Skinflick (12 page)

“Take it easy,” he said.

Fullbright didn’t answer. He charged again. Dave sidestepped and put out a foot. Fullbright fell over it. His momentum pitched him into the companionway. He hit the steps hard. The crash was loud. For a few seconds, he lay face down and didn’t move.

“Jack!” The girl ran to him, crouched by him, put her breakable-looking hands on him. “Jack? Are you all right?”

Fullbright moaned. Slowly he pushed himself up. He turned groggily on the steps. His look at Dave was savage. Blood ran out of his nose into his moustache, down his chin, into his chest hair. He put a hand over his nose.

“Oh, my God,” the girl said.

“Why don’t you get him a towel?” Dave said.

“He’s bleeding to death,” the girl said.

Dave took her skinny arm, pulled her to her feet. She was about as weightless as a bird. He swung her toward the sleep cabin. He slapped her butt. “Make it wet and cold.”

She went, making whimpering noises. A cool, salty breath of air that said night was starting came down the companionway. Dave said to Fullbright:

“That was stupid. I’d already searched the box.”

“Why?” It came muffled by the covering hand.

“It looked odd to me when you got it out of your office so fast after I’d been there. I thought you moved it on my account. Naturally that made me curious about what was in it. You run your own business on the side, no?”

Fullbright took away his hand to try to speak and blood ran down his front. “Ribbons, goddamn it!” He yelled this and blood sprayed fine in the bloody light.

“Coming!” She sounded panicked.

“Strictly porno and skinflick makers,” Dave said.

Fullbright shut his eyes and nodded. He leaned against the wall. His chest moved as if he’d run a mile. His color was pasty. Ribbons came with a beach towel big as a blanket. It was heavy for her to lug. She held it against herself. Water drizzled out of it down her pretty legs. It soaked the papers scattered on the rug. She sat by him on the steps and began trying to mop the blood off him. He yanked a corner of the towel away from her and wadded it against his face, moaning again. He opened his eyes and glared at Dave. The towel muffled his words.

“You practically killed me,” he said.

“You tripped,” Dave said. “It’s never safe to run on a boat.” Watching Ribbons at her inept and tearful first aid, Dave found a cigarette and lit it. He told Fullbright, “I can understand your wanting to keep your little sideline secret from your partner. He was a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t like it. He also was a businessman and wouldn’t like your keeping all the profits for yourself.” Fullbright began to shudder. Dave went into the cabin and stripped a blanket off one of the beds. He brought it back and pushed it at Ribbons. “He’s chilling. Wrap him up.”

“Why don’t you get out of here?” she said. But she took the blanket and began getting it around Fullbright very clumsily. “Haven’t you done enough?”

“I haven’t found out enough.” Dave said it from back of the bar, treading carefully in all the broken glass. He found a bottle of Courvoisier that Fullbright’s hysteria had spared. Glasses hung upside down from racks over the bar. He took one down and half filled it. He went back to Fullbright, crouched in front of him, gently pulled away the hand clutching the wad of towel, tipped the brandy into his mouth. His eyes were closed again. He coughed, spluttered. Opened his eyes. He pushed feebly at the glass. “Take it,” Dave said. “It’ll make you feel better. Guarantee.”

“He’s dying,” Ribbons whimpered.

“Nobody dies of a broken nose,” Dave said. Fullbright had the glass in his hand now and worked on the brandy by himself. Dave stood up. “What I can’t understand is why you’d bother to keep it a secret from me.”

“The IRS,” Fullbright said. “I never paid taxes on it.”

“And you thought I’d run to the Feds,” Dave said.

“Why not? I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re nosing around about. Yes, I was scared. I thought they had Jerry’s murder all wrapped up. Then you walk in and it’s a whole nother ball-game.” He looked sourly at the strewn wreckage of his records. “I was going to take those out to sea tomorrow and dump them.”

“So Dawson doesn’t connect to Spence Odum,” Dave said.

“Dawson connects to Old Rugged Cross Productions,” Fullbright said. “Connected. To the Salvation Army, the Methodist Overseas Mission, the Baptist Synod, the Bringing in the Sheaves Women’s Auxiliary.”

An ashtray was on a coffee table in front of one of the buttoned couches. The ashtray was in the shape of a ship’s helm, with a shallow bowl of amber glass set into it. Dave put ashes from his cigarette there. He looked at the weepy girl. “Your name isn’t Ribbons. What is it really—Charleen?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.” She looked at Fullbright. “Do I have to tell him anything?”

Dave said, “Only if your name is Charleen. And, if you’d really like to be helpful, where you come from.”

“From Santa Monica.” She jerked her head under all that heavy blond hair. “Two miles from here. All my life. And it’s not Charleen.” She made a face. “Yuck. It’s not just Ribbons, either. It’s—get ready for this—Scarlet Ribbons. From an old Harry Belafonte record my mom had when she was about ten or something. When she grew up she was going to have a little girl and call her Scarlet Ribbons. Believe it. Then she went and married a man named Schultz. And it didn’t make any difference. Her name was Hathaway. Now that would have been almost all right, right? But Scarlet Ribbons Schultz? That’s too much, isn’t it?”

Dave smiled. “It’s quite a bit.” He asked Fullbright, “Feeling better?”

Fullbright pushed the towel into Ribbons’s lap and stood up, hitching the blanket around him with one hand, the other one hanging onto the empty glass. “I felt fine until you showed up. I still would the fuck like to know what you want with me.”

“Dawson was sleeping with a kid about like this one.” Dave nodded at Ribbons. “In a top-level apartment above the Sunset Strip. She’s not there anymore. I’m looking for someone to tell me where she is.”

“Jerry? Sleeping with a teenage girl?” Fullbright laughed. “You have to be out of your mind.”

“I don’t believe he was murdered on his street,” Dave said. “I believe he was murdered in that apartment and transported across town after he was dead and dumped there for his wife to stumble over in the morning. His wife and son.”

“And you think Charleen—that’s the girl, right? You expected me to have her here?” Fullbright took the brandy bottle off the bar and poured another shot into his glass. To do this he had to let the blanket fall but he didn’t care. He drank from the glass before he picked the blanket up again. “I don’t have her here. I never had her here. I never heard of her. If Jerry was really sleeping with her, you can bet he wouldn’t tell anybody, least of all me. He had his moral superiority to maintain.” He grinned. Very gingerly he touched his nose. Blood had stopped coming out of it but it was swelling. So was the flesh around his eyes. And turning dark red. “That’s a wild idea. I mean, the wildest.”

“Somebody’s got her someplace,” Dave said. “Unless she was killed the same night as Dawson, as Ludwig.”

“Ludwig?” Fullbright’s head came forward, scowling. “Herman Ludwig, the cameraman?”

“Shotgun,” Dave said. “You didn’t know?”

Fullbright looked stunned. He shook his head. “They got him, then—the commies?”

“That’s what his wife thinks,” Dave said.

“Jesus,” Fullbright whispered and drank more brandy.

Ribbons took the wet and bloody towel back to the head.

“What about Spence Odum?” Dave said. “He never mentioned this Charleen child to you?”

“I haven’t talked to Spence in—hell; how long? I find him when I want to get paid. That’s about it.”

“Take care of yourself,” Dave said, and went up the companionway into what was left of daylight.

T
HE HEADLIGHTS OF THE
Triumph showed cut brush heaped high next to the driveway, almost covering the mailbox. The Triumph jolted down into the yard. Where limbs had been sawed off shrubs and trees, the wounds showed white. Under the naked-looking trees, sand was heaped, sacks of cement, stacked two-by-fours, bundles of wood shingles. The headlights shone back at him, multiplied in the panes of the French doors. He wanted the natural cover back.

He yanked the wheel of the Triumph to park it and the lights gleamed off a yellow motorbike. A youth sat with his back against it. He winced in the light and stood up. He seemed to unfold forever. He had to be seven feet tall. Reedy, all knuckles, wrists, joints, he came toward the car. Clean white Levi’s, clean white T-shirt, clean fair hair cut short. Dave shut off the engine. Crickets. The boy leaned down to peer inside. He looked worried.

“Mr. Brandstetter? Can I talk to you, sir?”

“Not if you’re selling magazines,” Dave said.

“What?” The boy sounded ready to cry. “Oh, no. No, it’s important. It’s about—the case you’re working on. Bucky Dawson’s father? The one who was murdered, you know?”

“What’s your name?” Dave pushed the door handle and the boy backed a step and Dave got out of the Triumph.

“Engstrom,” the boy said, “Dwight.” In the dark, his voice sounded too young for the size of him. “I saw you yesterday, when you came to see Bucky, and I heard you talking to his mom. I live across the street.”

“In the house with the noisy window latches,” Dave said. “Come on.” He headed for the cookhouse. What he took to be bricks loomed in the courtyard under the oak. He said, “How did you find me?”

“I got worried. I asked Bucky. He said it was about the insurance and if you asked me I should just tell you the same thing I told the police.”

Dave found the light switch this time without guessing. “You’re on the basketball team at Bethel Church, right?” He opened the refrigerator and peered into the dark. “All I’ve got here that’s nonalcoholic is milk.” He looked up into the boy’s scared blue eyes. “Will milk be all right?”

“Thank you. That’s very kind.” Engstrom stared around him. The kitchen was plainly stranger than he liked. It made him uneasy but he didn’t run. “Yes, I’m on the team. I’m not a good athlete but I’m tall.”

“I noticed.” Dave unwrapped a glass, rinsed it at the tap, and filled it with milk. Engstrom took it, drank from it, and left a little-kid milk line on his upper lip.

He said, “Bucky said it was Sequoia Insurance, so I called them and they gave me this address. They gave me the phone too, but no one answered.”

The plastic-bagged ice cubes in the freezer compartment had clumped. Dave took the bag out and banged it on the tile counter. He put the cubes that came loose into a glass and pushed the bag away again. “And what did you say to the police?” He measured gin over the ice cubes. He flavored the gin with vermouth. “That Bucky was with you in the church basement till eleven-thirty or twelve the night his father was killed?” He got olives from the refrigerator, dropped two into the drink, recapped the little bottle, shut it up in the dark again. Pushing the ice cubes clockwise with a finger, he turned to face the tall boy, eyebrows raised.

“Bucky said that was best. It wouldn’t do any harm. They had the man that killed him. It would only confuse things and make a lot of useless trouble for his mother.”

“But it wasn’t true?” Dave tasted the drink. Warm.

“Reverend Shumate came down and said there was a phone call for him. Around nine. He went and didn’t come back. I’ve been very—I felt bad about lying. Worried. Then when you came and started asking stuff, and Bucky was scared and begged me not to tell you anything different—well, I thought I better tell you the way it really was.”

“Why not the police?” Dave lit a cigarette. “If you want to clear your conscience—they’re the ones you lied to.”

Dwight Engstrom’s childlike face turned red. “Do I have to? I hate for them to know I lied before.”

“It hardly ever works out,” Dave said.

“I won’t do it again,” Engstrom said earnestly, “never in my life. I wouldn’t have done it then for anybody else. But Bucky—I guess you don’t know him too well. But Bucky would never do anything wrong.”

“There aren’t any human beings like that,” Dave said.

“He just wanted to protect his mother,” Engstrom said. “They had enough trouble already, didn’t they?”

“How much is enough?” Dave said. “What did Bucky do with those three hours?”

“I don’t know. I asked him. He said it didn’t matter.”

“It matters.” Dave took jack cheese out of the fridge and cut squares off it. He held the small bright new cutting board out to the boy. “Eat. Did you get home at midnight?” Engstrom’s big clean hand fumbled little cheese cubes into his mouth. “Did you see Gerald Dawson, Senior, lying dead in front of his garage doors?”

Engstrom swallowed. “No, I came home the back way.”

Dave took a bite of cheese. It had bits of
jalapeno
in it. Fiery. He nodded for the boy to eat some more. Engstrom shook his head. Dave set the board down and tried his drink again. It had chilled. He said, “But it was Shumate who came to get Bucky?”

“He was back in ten minutes. Reverend Shumate, I mean. That’s why practice went on so late.” Engstrom gave a wry little smile. “He’s a basketball freak. He never wants to quit.” He finished off the milk, set the glass down with a click on the counter tiles, and looked anxious. “It’ll be all right, now, will it? You won’t have to tell the police I lied, will you?”

“It won’t be all right,” Dave said, “you know that. But I thank you for coming and telling me. It will help. Not Bucky Dawson and his mother. It will help me.” He put a hand in the middle of Engstrom’s long bony back and steered him to the kitchen door. “Maybe I won’t have to tell the police. But if I do, you won’t feel too bad about it.”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Engstrom said, sounding again as if he might cry. He took three steps into the darkness and turned back. “Why won’t I?”

“You’ll be among friends,” Dave said.

His legs ached, not from the climb but from sitting on the floor at Noguchi’s. Also he was a little drunk from the flame-warmed sake. But the black-lacquer surroundings had been pleasant and the food had been all right. He’d kept away from vinegar and raw fish. Mel Fleischer had been amiable enough and his young friend Makoto had been good to look at. He hadn’t worn a happy coat. He’d worn torn-off Levi’s and a tank top printed with the USC Trojan helmet. In the candlelight, he’d looked carved out of some fine-grained brown wood rubbed to a flawless finish. He had a terrible accent but his smile made up for it. Dave hoped he’d understood as little English as he spoke, because most of Mel’s talk had been about boys he’d had before Makoto. The stories were witty even if you’d already heard them, and Dave had. But he doubted they’d inspire fidelity.