Skinflick (11 page)

The body didn’t make much of a rise in the sheet that covered it. It didn’t take up much room on the long steel slab the attendant in the green smock pulled on silent rollers out of a wall. Barker laid the sheet back. She had hardly any breasts at all. She was greenish pale except for the slash down her front made by the medical examiner and the cut where her scalp had been laid back and then replaced. The hair was the color of sun-bleached southwest hillside grass—between yellow and white. There were bruises on her throat, scratches.

“Strangled,” Dave said.

Barker opened a file folder. “Right. Also skull fracture. Also raped. And”—he pulled the sheet all the way down—“she once had polio. One leg shorter than the other.” Dave looked at it. It was sticklike, the knee a pitiful outsize knob. He took the edge of the sheet and covered the girl up again.

“I don’t think it’s her,” he said. “Nobody mentioned any limp. One of my witnesses said she danced well. This one may have danced—I hope so—but it can’t have been well.” He called thanks to the attendant.

In the elevator, Barker said, “Did Odum tell you he hired your girl—Charleen?”

“He only got nervous,” Dave said, “and pressed for time.”

They got off the elevator. “Did you ask him about Ludwig?”

“I didn’t know about Ludwig then,” Dave said.

“You don’t know about him now.” Back at his desk, Barker emptied a heavy, sharp-cornered glass ashtray into a metal wastebasket. “He was in this country illegally. Ludwig wasn’t even his name. He was scared to use it. He was scared to surface enough even to work where he might be noticed—Columbia, Paramount.”

“He had a big reputation in Europe,” Dave said.

“Oh, so you do know,” Barker said.

“I know that,” Dave said. “What else is there?”

“The Hungarian party had it in for him. His story was they were chasing him all over the world to kill him.” The telephone on Barker’s desk rang. He lifted the receiver, listened a minute, grunted “Thanks,” and hung up. He looked at Dave. “And they found him. And they killed him, didn’t they?”

“Why was he illegal? A prominent artist—they don’t have trouble defecting. ‘I lift my lamp beside the—’”

“It would make headlines. The baddies would get him.”

“Sounds like paranoia to me,” Dave said.

“The kind that gets you killed,” Barker said.

“Maybe,” Dave said. “It’s neat but neatness isn’t everything.” He stood up. “So who do I see at the sheriffs department? You know all about it. So you looked into it. So you thought the way I think—that there might be some connection. Who do I talk to over there?”

“Salazar,” Barker said. “But it’s the way I told you. Ask Ludwig’s widow if you want confirmation. Salazar will give you her address.”

Dave picked up the receiver of Barker’s phone. “How do I get an outside line?” he said.

The apartment was old tan brick, down a side street from Melrose in Hollywood. The windows were small. Cracked plaster Egyptian pillars flanked the door to a dark hallway that went straight to the back. At one side of the hallway, stairs went up. They were about to be boxed in by walls and a door. New fire regulations. The framework of two-by-fours was already in. The smell of fresh-sawn pine was pleasant, nearly covering the sad, sour smell of too many decades of living that seeped through the desperately fresh paper on the walls, the hopelessly fresh carpeting he walked on.

Number six was the last door in the downstairs hallway. After he pressed the buzzer he looked out the rear window. A pair of cats lay curled asleep in the sun on the green tin lid of a big trash module by a chain-link fence. Marigolds struggled in a strip of parched earth against the fence. He saw the stucco corner of a garage. A lock clicked inside the door. The varnish on the door was laid over fifty years of earlier varnish and was nearly black. The door opened four inches. The face that peered at him was bone white, almost fleshless, with fierce patches of rouge. Black lines had been drawn around eyes large, dark, but more annoyed than frightened.

“What do you want?” She had a thick accent and her voice was a gasp. “Who are you?”

“My name is Brandstetter.” He held open his wallet so she could read the license. “I’m an insurance investigator.”

“My husband did not have.” She tried to close the door. He put his foot in it. “Please. I have no time.”

“Another man was murdered on the same night as your husband,” Dave told her. “It’s about his death I want to talk to you. I think the two might be connected. Someone innocent is going to suffer if I can’t clear the matter up.”

Her laugh was harsh and turned into a hacking cough. “Someone innocent is going to suffer? That will be a novelty in this world.” Her eyes went angry, her voice scornful. “The innocent are always the ones who suffer. What kind of man are you, not to know that?”

“I told you,” Dave said. “The kind that wants to prevent it. If I can. You want to help me or not?”

She shut the door. A chain rattled. She opened the door. The rest of her was as wasted as her face. She clutched an armload of clothes to the flat bosom of a faded shirt. A green dish towel was tied over her hair. From what he could see of it, the hair was sparse. It started far back on her brow. She wore jeans that hung off skeletal hips. The jeans weren’t roomy—she’d shrunk away inside them. He thought she was very sick and that she had once been very beautiful. She went and laid the armload of clothes in a big scuffed leather suitcase that lay open on a Danish couch with scratched woodwork and threadbare plaid cushions. A small suitcase lay on a chair. There was a brand-new, shiny red metal footlocker.

“Who was this other fortunate man?” she asked.

“Gerald Dawson. His business was renting film equipment. The camera your husband used. For Spence Odum.”

“I do not know him.” She lit a cigarette, the old-fashioned kind, short and thick, no tip. The first intake of smoke started her coughing. It wracked her, bent her over. It sounded like ripping canvas. The cigarette hanging in her garishly lipsticked mouth, she clung to the back of a chair till the coughs stopped shaking her. She whispered, “He never mentioned the name. Was he Hungarian? It sounds like not a Hungarian name. Dawson?”

“He was an American who went to church a lot.”

Her wry smile showed teeth of surprising whiteness and evenness. He’d thought she was fifty. The teeth said thirty. “They would not be friends,” she said. “My husband was an artist, an intellectual. He regarded religion as superstition.” The cigarette bobbed as she spoke. Smoke from it trickled up into an eye. She squinted that eye. “He distrusted systems of thought. He felt they cramped the mind and made fools of people.” She went into a farther room and came back with another armload of clothes. “He said religion only caused hatred and bloodshed. He was an intelligent man and a gifted one. You must not think he filmed only sex pictures for vermin like this Spence Odum.”

“I don’t,” Dave said. “Why did he do it here?”

She knelt to lay the clothes in the footlocker. She looked up at Dave. “He had made enemies in Hungary. He would not keep quiet about the horrors of the regime. When they tried and jailed a friend who was a writer, he spoke out. If he had not fled, they would have killed him.”

“But he never made any speeches in the West,” Dave said. “He didn’t come out as a dissident. He didn’t lay charges about this writer.”

“For my sake,” she said. “For the sake of relatives left behind in Hungary.”

“So he was out of the way and was no harm to them,” Dave said. “Why would they come here and kill him?”

She shrugged and stood. Sick as she looked, she moved like a girl, a girl trained in grace. Maybe she’d been an actress. “He would not tell me what lay behind his fear. He wanted me to know nothing in case I should be caught and tortured.”

“Did you ever think perhaps he imagined it?”

“He did not imagine his own death,” she said. “That was quite a reality, was it not?”

“Yes, but the killer hasn’t been caught,” Dave said. “Maybe it wasn’t someone from Hungary. Maybe instead it had to do with Gerald Dawson’s murder.”

“No.” She shook her head. “They were following him. Always. He saw them in Portugal, and the same ones again in Brazil, and the same ones again in Canada.”

“He saw them,” Dave said. “Did you see them?”

“No, I did not, but that means nothing.” She looked hard at Dave. “He was not mad. How can you think that when this has happened?”

“What about here?” Dave said. “Did he tell you he’d seen them here?”

“No. He told me we had escaped them at last.” Bitterly she twisted out her cigarette in an ashtray on a cheap teak-veneer end table. A lamp whose tweedy white shade years and cigarette smoke had yellowed stood on the table. So did a five-by-seven photograph in a dime-store frame. She picked up the photograph and gazed at it. “And then, in a dark parking lot, seven thousand miles from Budapest, they killed him.” With a sleeve of the old blouse she wiped the glass on the photograph and laid it on the folded clothes in the footlocker. She stood looking down at it, motionless. “And now, I can go home.” She turned Dave the wry smile again. “I never said it to him, of course—but I was dying to go home.” A bleak laugh rustled in her throat. “Now I am going home to die. Isn’t it funny?”

Dave didn’t answer. He had stepped over to the footlocker. He was looking down at the photograph. It was black-and-white. Against a background of river and bridge, a man and woman stood close. The woman was lovely. A breeze blew the picture hat she wore, fluttered the ribbons. She hung onto the hat and smiled at the camera. Her arm was around the waist of a big, grinning man, barrel-shaped, soft-looking. Frizzy fair hair stood out all over his head.

T
HE SUN BULGED OUT
as it got to ocean level. It was bloated and smoky red. He stood at the end of the long, white-painted pier and watched it go down. Sailing craft, power craft passed, headed for moorings. Sounds drifted to him from the boats, high children’s voices, a man’s laugh, someone having poor luck with a guitar. A crowd of heavy-bodied pelicans splashed down awkwardly into the red water. The wings of circling gulls were like porcelain, the red light shining through them. Nearby, ice cubes rattled in a martini pitcher. The tang of charcoal smoke reached him. He wanted a drink. He wanted to eat. He was tired. But when he’d been here earlier with Randy Van, the flame-color 260Z hadn’t stood in the fenced and guarded parking lot belonging to this pier. Now the car was there. So he had to do this.

He clambered aboard a shiny white fiberglass cabin cruiser. It wasn’t the biggest or showiest craft along here but it was big and showy enough, forty-five, fifty feet. The rear deck he stepped onto was glowing teak planks. Brass rails gleamed. He opened a pair of glossy hatch doors and a teak companionway took him down into a teak cabin with brass lanterns, buttoned cowhide couches, thick carpet. A stereo played softly. This, the car, the fact the cabin wasn’t locked, all said he should be here. But he could be in a restaurant. That would be nice. Dave opened a door at the far end of the cabin. Beds were in the next cabin—not bunks, beds. He heard the splash of a shower.

Above the beds were cabinets. He stepped up on a bed and looked into the cabinets. Sheets, blankets, a life jacket no carton. He stepped up on the other bed and the carton wasn’t in those cabinets either. He got down and knelt and opened storage drawers under the beds. Clothes. Boat gear. He stood up, and one of the cabinet doors had swung open, and he rapped his skull on it. From beyond the door to the head, a male voice called, over the noise of the shower:

“Help yourself to a drink, baby. Fix me a G and T, will you? I’ll be out in a minute.”

Dave went into the forward cabin again and searched drawers under the cowhide couches. Cameras. Skin-diving stuff. No carton. He shut the drawers, looked around him, went behind a small bar. The carton stood on the floor. He picked it up, set it on the bar, put on his reading glasses. The flap corners of the carton had been tucked under each other to keep it closed. He tugged them up. Raw film was supposed to be in the box. It wasn’t. A ledger lay there. He lifted it out and opened it. The entries went back more than five years. The handwriting was always the same though the pens used were different. The bookkeeping wasn’t fancy—just amounts paid and by whom, never for what. The customer’s names didn’t tell him much—except Spence Odum’s. The light wasn’t good coming in through brass-bound portholes off the water. The music whispered. Small waves lisped against the hull. The boat very gently rocked. He laid the ledger on the bar.

Next in the box lay manila folders. In alphabetical order by customer name, the same names as those in the ledger. The folders held copies of invoices. Written by hand, not typed, by the same hand as had kept the ledger. The invoices weren’t imprinted
SUPERSTAR.
They weren’t imprinted at all, not even with an address. They were signed
Jack Fullbright
They listed what Dave took to be photographic, lighting, recording equipment, each piece with a serial number. Charges were added up at the foot of a far-right column. All those he saw were scrawled
paid.
He chose a few invoices from different folders, creased them, and pushed them into a pocket.

“Who the hell are you?”

He turned around, taking off the glasses. A frail-looking girl in a bikini crouched halfway down the companionway with a thin hand on the brass rail. The dying light behind her said she was blond. There was a lot of hair and it shadowed her face. She took off big, round sunglasses and came down the last of the steps. Frowning.

“What are you doing? What’s that stuff? Where’s Jack?”

“In the shower,” Dave said. “Are you Charleen Sims?”

She didn’t answer. She ran past the bar into the cabin with the beds. “Jack,” she said. “There’s some dude out here, looking through your stuff.”

“What!” A door slammed open. Fullbright appeared in the doorway to the front cabin. He was naked and wet. A white band around his pelvis interrupted the suntan. He stood still for a second, hands on the doorframe, staring at Dave, at the carton. Behind him, the girl looked scared. Then Fullbright charged. A swing of his arm sent carton, ledger book, files, flying. He lunged across the bar, grabbing for Dave. Dave stepped out from behind the bar. Fullbright’s long reach knocked bottles off the shelf behind the bar. The bottles hit each other and shattered on the thick rug. Gin smells rose, whiskey smells. Dave pushed his glasses into a pocket.