Skinflick (16 page)

“Why would he lie to me and say he never heard of her?” Dave picked up the margarita glass and put it into Randy’s hand. “Was he with you when Herman Ludwig was shot?”

“Of course. I told you—Spence was the one who sent me to find him.” Randy gulped the rest of the margarita and set the glass down. “You don’t think Spence killed him!” He began shoving the junk back into the handbag. “Spence couldn’t step on a bug. He’d have nightmares of guilt, waking and sleeping. He wouldn’t be able to eat, wouldn’t be able to face people. You don’t know him. He’s very sensitive.” Randy worked the catch on the handbag flap. “He can’t even bear to hurt people’s feelings. Pick up a gun and kill a human being? Even somebody he hated he couldn’t do that to. And he was crazy about Herman.”

“He’s got a streak someplace that isn’t nice,” Dave said. “What about the man with his throat slit?”

“In the barber chair? That’s a dummy, a joke.”

“Somebody’s hiding her.” Dave got off the stool. “Let’s go see whether he can tell the truth today.”

“He’s out in the van, doing location stuff,” Randy said. “That’s why I’ve got this time. I’m not in any outdoor shots. The makeup makes me sweat too much. My identity runs.”

“He’ll be back when it gets dark?”

Dave didn’t hear Randy’s answer because Mittelnacht came in at the sun-bright door. Outside it, the same suntanned youngsters were eating fancyburgers in the polluted heat. The same Peter Frampton record was yelling at them. Mittelnacht wore black glasses. A tank top dyed a dozen runny colors covered his skinny torso. The slept-in black jeans, were the same. Today they were tucked into black cowboy boots. He headed for the black bandstand in the corner and Dave said to Randy, “Excuse me a, minute,” slid the photograph off the bar, and went after Mittelnacht. He caught up with him between empty tables. Mittelnacht took off the black glasses. His hair was lank. He smelled of baby-oil shampoo. “It’s you,” he said. “What’s this?”

“You tell me,” Dave said. “It’s supposed to be Charleen.”

“It is. Only where did you get it? Wow.” His tone and the little brief smile that went with it were marveling. “What the fuck was she into? You know what this is, man?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Dave said.

“Some private eye,” Mittelnacht said.

Dave took the photo back from him and studied it. “Infrared,” he said. “Only to what point? Why would she pose in the dark? Was she shy?”

“Hell, she loved having her picture taken. It was a drag. Go to the beach, she’d spend twenty bucks and half a day in those take-your-own-portrait booths.”

“Not this kind of portrait,” Dave said.

“I’ve got some like that. On Polaroid. It’s got a gizmo so we could appear together.”

“Fully clothed, no doubt,” Dave said.

Mittelnacht grinned. “Bare ass and banging.”

“Somebody was with her,” Dave said. “There have to be more of these pictures, a whole set, and in the rest, she’s not alone. It was a setup. A dark motel room. Just her and some unsuspecting man. And a hidden photographer.” He looked at Mittelnacht. “I hope you hung onto those Polaroids.”

“Blackmail.” Mittelnacht looked sober. “I’ll get them back before I do a record that hits the charts. You bet your ass I will.” His forehead wrinkled. “You didn’t find her, yet? That Odum character didn’t know where she was?”

“He didn’t say so,” Dave said. “But I’m going to ask him again tonight. If I find her, I’ll try to get your pictures back for you.”

“What’s going on?” Randy came to them.

Mittelnacht looked him up and down doubtfully.

Dave said, “Mittelnacht, Randy Van.”

They made indifferent noises. Mittelnacht said to Dave, “You really think she’s alive?”

“Nobody’s proved otherwise,” Dave said, “and I need her to answer questions. If I can’t find her, a boy that killed his own father is going to get away with it, and a man that never hurt anyone is going to end up on death row. So I have to believe she’s alive, don’t I?” He turned to Randy. “Do you like to ride horses?”

“Have they got sidesaddles?” Randy asked.

“Probably not. You can change. We’ll stop by your place.”

“I love the stopping-by-my-place idea,” Randy said. “But not to change. I don’t look right in britches.”

“You never know till you try,” Dave said. “Ah, the hell with it. We’ll stop at a supermarket instead.”

“What for?” Randy asked.

“Apples. If you won’t exercise them, you can feed them, all right?” He lifted a hand to Mittelnacht. “Don’t forget—if you see her, phone me.”

Mittelnacht wasn’t listening. He was staring hard at Randy. He said to Dave, “I don’t think that’s a girl.”

“Ho-hum,” Randy said.

I
T WAS UP ONE
of those narrow, crooked old Topanga roads that floods out in winter. Big sycamores dense with sunny green leafage leaned white trunks over a creek where the water ran summer-shallow among bleached boulders. The Triumph crossed a tough little new cement bridge. From mossy rocks beneath it, a fishing raccoon looked up. A plump gray quail led a crooked string of young across the road and into brush. Mule deer swiveled big ears at them from a clump of live oaks.

The human habitations here were mostly old and shacky. Rickety automobiles and dusty pickup trucks with camper shells waited beside them. Horses browsed by barbwire fences or found shade under corrugated plastic roofs held up by out-of-plumb four-by-fours. Their tails swished off flies. Dogs bolted into the road and chased the car, barking cheerfully. Dave kept reading tin mailboxes. The one that read
TOOKER
was neatly enameled white, a little housie, with the name punched out of metal along the roof peak and, topping it, a sheet-metal cutout of a bowlegged cowboy with Stetson and guitar. The old rail fence was fresh white.

The Triumph went up a drive of white gravel. The house was rickety bat-and-board but fresh white also. Fist-size rocks had been whitewashed and enclosed bright flowerbeds—nasturtiums, orange, yellow, Indian red. He parked between the Mercedes and a hard-used estate wagon, probably Tooker’s. When he switched off the Triumph, he heard the slow tap of typewriter keys. At the side of the house, a deck was built around the trunk of an old pepper tree. Under the tree sat Karen Shiflett. A toy-red portable typewriter was in front of her on a TV eating table made of a wooden tray on tubular tin legs. At her bare feet were a box of envelopes and a stack of multigraphed letters. She bent close to the typewriter, peering nearsightedly. She poked the keys, studied an address book, poked the keys again. She didn’t look up until Dave made a noise, setting down the carton of apples.

“Oh, hi! Where did you come from?”

Dave looked up the slope behind the house. Twenty yards off, half a dozen palominos fed on strewn hay in a white-railed paddock. Their coats shone golden, their manes and tails cream white. The paddock was half shadowed by a gaunt stable, open in front, sided and backed in vertical slats. Inside the stable moved the stick figure of the pimply kid from Keyhole Books. He looked healthier out here. When he stepped into the sunlight with a saddle blanket, his long yellow hair gleamed. He wore a green satin cowboy shirt, jeans, cowboy boots. Smoothing the blanket over the back of one of the horses, he stared down at Dave and Randy for a minute, then went back into the shadows of the barn.

“What happened to your horse sale?” Dave asked.

“Lon said no.” She sighed and set aside the flimsy table that held the typewriter. She stood up and put out a hand to Randy. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Karen Shiflett.”

“Sorry,” Dave said. “Randy Van.”

“Nice to know you.” Randy sounded faint and forlorn. Karen was wearing one of Lon Tooker’s shirts again, knotted under her pert breasts again. Randy was eyeing those breasts. With thoughtful sadness. Karen turned for the aluminum screen door that opened from the house to the deck. She wore drawstring trousers of thin Indian cotton. Her neat little butt moved saucily inside them. Dave heard Randy sigh.

“Beer?” Karen asked. “Or lemonade?”

“Maybe with tequila?” Randy asked.

“No problem.” Karen raised eyebrows at Dave.

“Beer, thanks,” he said.

“He didn’t murder anybody,” she said when she came out with a painted Mexican tray, glasses of lemonade, a tequila bottle, a can of Coors, and a basket of corn chips. “So he doesn’t need any defense.” She set the tray down on the redwood bench that edged the deck. “So it isn’t going to cost him anything. So don’t sell the horses.” She put herself on the bench next to the tray and held out Dave’s beer to him. She patted the bench on the other side of the tray and said to Randy, “I’ll let you put in the firewater, okay?”

“Lovely.” Randy sat down, laid his handbag aside, took up the lemonade glass, and swallowed from it deeply. He set the glass down, uncorked the tequila bottle, and laced the drink back up to the rim of the glass. Karen watched him interestedly, watched him recork the tequila, then looked up at Dave, squinting a little because of the sun through the pepper tree. “I told you Lon was a child.”

“Maybe not.” Dave took a blank envelope from the box and walked to the edge of the deck. He’d heard the paddock gate creak, the rattle of its latch. He heard the clop of hoofs. One of the palominos was coming downhill, the kid on its back, swaying in a tooled leather saddle. Dave vaulted the deck rail and climbed to the edge of the path. The kid reined in the horse. It looked at Dave with gentle eyes, blew softly through its big, velvety nostrils, turned its head away with a shake that rattled bit and bridle. “Do me a favor,” Dave asked the kid. He held out the envelope to him. The kid swung down out of the saddle. “Scrape one of his feet a little,” Dave said, “and put the scrapings into this for me.”

“What for?” The kid took the envelope, blinked at it, fingered its smoothness, looked at Dave. “Some way it’s going to help Lon?”

“If I hadn’t thought so,” Dave said, “would I have driven clear the hell out here?”

“I don’t know why you want to help him,” the kid said.

“He’s taking up a jail cell,” Dave said, “that rightfully belongs to the beneficiary of Gerald Dawson’s insurance policy.”

“You’re trying to save your company money.”

“You’ve got it,” Dave said.

The kid shrugged. He let the horse’s reins hang. It didn’t offer to go anywhere. The kid put a shoulder against its glossy ribcage, bent, tapped the near fetlock. The horse lifted its foot. The kid used a twig to pry debris from the hoof. The horse put the hoof down again, took a step away and stopped. The kid picked up the debris from the path and tucked it into the envelope. He handed the envelope back to Dave. “I guess that’s why they pay you,” he said. “Hell, I could have thought of it and I didn’t. It’s going to show the horse stuff on Dawson’s clothes didn’t come from here, isn’t it?”

“Hold the thought,” Dave said, and put the envelope into a pocket. He turned back toward the house. “Thanks.”

“You want to ride?” the kid said. “Your girl want to ride? They all need exercise. Karen’s busy. And my ass is about worn out.”

“Raincheck?” Dave said. “I want to get this to a lab.”

“Don’t wait too long.” The kid swung back into the saddle. “They could starve to death.”

“Not for apples,” Dave said. “I brought a box.”

“Beautiful,” the kid said, and nudged the horse in the ribs with his heels. It ambled toward the road. “Lon better get his ass back here, that’s all I know.”

Dave returned to the deck. Karen and Randy weren’t there. A breeze came from somewhere. Dry red berries pattered down from the pepper tree. The top sheets from the multigraphed stack slithered across the planks. He picked them up, glanced at them, laid them back on the stack and weighted the stack with a little green plastic pot that held a flowering cactus. He went into the house. The walls were paneled in fake birch. Paintings hung on them—little children with huge eyes, holding birds and small wild animals. A reel-to-reel tape recorder turned. A good-hearted, off-key bass voice, backed by instruction-book-one guitar chords, sang about saving the whales from the factory ships. Karen and Randy gazed at the pictures. Randy was cooing over them and downing lemonade. The tequila bottle was in his other hand. The cork was missing. He kept tilting the bottle over the ice cubes.

“We have to go,” Dave said. Out on the deck again, he nodded at the multigraphed pages and the blank envelopes. “Trying to raise a defense fund?”

“Talk about hoping against hope!” Karen dropped dismally onto the bench again and wearily pulled the typewriter to her. “The creeps that came to that store wouldn’t defend their own mothers—if they had mothers, which I seriously doubt. But”—she lifted her hands and let them fall—“it’s the only mailing list I’ve got, that and a few Sierra Club buddies. I had to do something. He won’t do anything.” She looked up at Dave with tears in her eyes. “You saw his pictures. He painted those himself. I know they’re lousy, but they’re sweet. You heard that song. He’s written a lot of songs like that. How could this thing happen to somebody like Lonny? How could he be so unlucky?”

“He’s not so unlucky,” Dave said. “He’s got a friend.”

In the Triumph, skidding and buzzing back down the canyon, beginning to meet upcoming cars now, people off work early, the start of the home-going rush, Randy sat silent, face turned away, gazing out the open window at the sunlight and shadows down the woodsy creekbed. The wind fluttered the neat, sun-streaked wig.

He didn’t seem to notice. Dave said, “Tequila got your tongue?”

Randy looked at him bleakly. “God, to have a body like that!”

“What’s supposed to be wrong with the one you’ve got?” Dave asked. “It looks fine to me.”

“It came from the wrong outfitter,” Randy said.

T
HE BIG BRICK ROOM
was blacked out again. This time, the lone shaft of light burned down on a sheeted body on a high table. Standing just inside the light were Spence Odum, wearing a false walrus moustache and a London bobby’s outfit, and the man in tweeds with the deerstalker cap. The camera and the kid who operated it were silhouetted this side of the staring light. The camera whirred. Odum, hamming fear and trembling, slowly raised the sheet on the side away from the camera. He flinched at what he saw and turned his face aside. The man in the deerstalker cap opened his eyes wide and registered horror.