Skinflick (18 page)

“You never give up,” Delgado said, and set a shiny glass on the empty shelf. “Why did you break his nose?”

Dave told him about Fullbright.

Delgado said, “Maybe he owns a shotgun. You didn’t go through every cupboard, every drawer. Dawson threatened to expose him for taking money out of the company, for not reporting his under-the-counter earnings to the IRS. Why didn’t he break Dawson’s neck to keep him from talking? Why didn’t he try to wipe out Spence Odum when he realized Odum had heard the quarrel with Dawson?”

“Because it’s been twelve days,” Dave said.

“Maybe he doesn’t look at the news,” Delgado said. “He was surprised when you told him it was Ludwig who was killed by the shotgun blast.”

Dave set cups dripping with suds in the rack. “He’d have known the difference.” He filled the pan again and sloshed steaming water over the cups to wash the suds off. “Odum’s dark, Ludwig was fair. It would take somebody not sure, somebody who’d never seen them together, or never seen Ludwig at all, to mix them up.”

“Did you ever think maybe Charleen had the shotgun?” Delgado touched a cup and drew his hand back sharply and shook it. “She’d only seen Odum once.”

Dave loaded saucers and plates into the sink. “She couldn’t break a man’s neck.”

“Fullbright could.” Delgado picked up a cup using the towel to shield his fingers from the heat, dried the cup, hung it on a hook in the cupboard. “It wasn’t just that Dawson was going to the IRS and the police or DA or whatever. You’re forgetting—he had Charleen to start with, then Dawson had her.”

“I’m not forgetting anything,” Dave said. “I’m remembering too much. That’s what’s wrong.”

“Aren’t you supposed to do the silverware before the plates?” Delgado asked. “I seem to remember Marie saying—”

“Marie was right,” Dave said, picked up handfuls of stainless-steel knives, forks, spoons, and dumped them into the soapy water. “He didn’t have anything to do with horses. I don’t think he took those records out of his office to keep me from running to the Feds about him. He had to have a likely reason. That was farfetched.” There was a bin at the end of the dish rack for silver. He began putting it clean into this bin. The rattling punctuated what he said. “What he was afraid of was that I’d figure Dawson had learned he was cheating him and dealing in smut and had reacted as Dawson would naturally react and I’d figure this was a motive for Fullbright to kill Dawson.” He splashed hot water over the shiny knives, forks, spoons. “Which doesn’t mean he did kill him.”

“Or that he didn’t,” Delgado said, finishing with the cups. “It could have been everything—fear of Dawson and hatred of Dawson for taking his girl—disgust with Dawson’s holier-than-thou pose. I mean—things do add up.” Delgado began to dry the stainless steel. “You can take this, you can take that.” He opened a drawer and dropped the clean flatware into it. “But then comes the next thing. It’s the total that gets you.”

“Except—when it gets you, what do you do?” Dave set saucers in the rack, then swabbed off the plates and racked them to drain. He glanced at Delgado. “You give up and drink. Bucky loses control. What would Fullbright do?” He poured steaming tap water over the plates. He felt around in the greasy water that showed a lot of tomato sauce at its edges, found the rubber cover of the drain with his fingers, and pulled it away. He rinsed it off and laid it on the counter. The water went out of the sink with a sucking sound. He rinsed the sink. He took the towel away from Delgado and dried his hands on it “I know better than to bet on human behavior, but I’m going to do it anyway.” He hung up the towel. “Fullbright is in this up to his eyebrows, but he didn’t murder anybody.”

“You’re on,” Delgado said. He looked at the plates steaming in the rack. “Are we through here?”

“They’ll drain dry,” Dave said. “Come on.”

M
OST OF THE BOATS
rocking at the long white mooring were dark, asleep. Here and there, a light showed at a porthole and wavered in the black water beneath. But the lap of tide against hulls and pilings and the hollow knock of their heels on the planks were the only sounds there were until they neared the end of the pier. This was why Fullbright had no near live-aboard neighbors. The loud music from his big white power launch. Not the easy-listening kind that had whispered from the speakers when Dave was here last. This was some kind of rock. No lights showed. Shadowy figures sat around the sheltered afterdeck. The shifting colors of a television screen painted their half nakedness. Teenagers. They sat on the padded bench along the taffrail and giggled and murmured and passed from hand to hand a handmade cigarette. When Dave and Delgado stepped aboard, a blond boy stood up and came to them.

“No admittance,” he said. “Private party.” He had the bleached eyebrows, the deep tan, the muscles, that made him a lifeguard, a permanent surfer, a beach bum, or all three. The smell of sun came off him. He was taller and broader than Dave and had a wine bottle in his hand. Baggy surfer trunks hung low off his hips and he wasn’t steady on his feet. “Please leave,” he said.

“This is urgent,” Dave said. “Tell Jack Fullbright it’s Dave Brandstetter. He’ll want to talk to me.”

“It’s past business hours,” the boy said.

“I didn’t ask for the time,” Dave said. “Go tell Jack Fullbright I’m here, please.”

The boy half turned and set the wine bottle down on a low round table among other wine bottles, bowls of chips, bowls of ravaged sour-cream and cheese dips. “I can break your arms,” the boy said.

“If you want cop-show dialogue,” Dave said, “my friend here is wearing a gun, and if you try to get cute, he will shoot you in the kneecap.”

The boy blinked white eyelashes at Delgado. Delgado glowered and put a hand inside his jacket over the rib cage. He told the blond boy, “He means it.”

A girl wearing a white Levi’s jacket over a bikini came around the table and took hold of the boy’s arm. “Ricky, come on and sit down.”

“Call him on the gun,” a male voice said out of the dark. Another one said, “Yeah, let’s see the gun.”

Delgado took out the gun, held it up, put it back.

The boy said to Dave, “He told us not to let anybody down there. We can’t go down there ourselves. If we have to pee, we pee over the side, right? He’s got people down there. He’s very busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

Dave went to the companionway, laid back the hatch doors, pulled open the short, shiny, vertical doors. Light from the brass lanterns down in the cabin made a yellow sheen on the teakwood steps and sent streaks up the brass handrails.

“I really wish you wouldn’t,” the boy said. “He’ll have my ass for this.”

“He’s probably had that already,” Delgado told him.

“That’s a sexist remark,” Dave said. The children were picking up gear and starting to leave. “Don’t go anywhere. He’s your friend. He gives you booze and grass. Don’t walk out on him when he needs you.”

A girl and a boy went anyway. The others stood as they were, doubtful, looking at Dave and Delgado, then at each other. The boy named Ricky said, “Okay. What’s it about? Who are you?”

“Private investigators,” Dave said. “Working for the insurance company that Jack Fullbright’s partner had a life policy with. He was murdered. It’s serious, right? So you will wait, won’t you?”

They murmured, took steps this way and that way, then one by one sat down. Dave went down the companionway. At the foot of it he stopped. Delgado bumped against him. “Sexist or not,” he said, “I was right.” He pointed.

The door in the bulkhead separating the cabin with the leather couches and bar and music system, from the cabin with the beds was open, and it showed Dave naked legs waving happily. Slim, shaved legs tangled with muscled, hairy legs. The music was very loud down here. Dave went and turned it off. In the sleeping cabin, a boy like Ricky, long blond hair in his eyes, tumbled onto the floor between the beds. He lay on his back, laughing. He was naked, and a naked girl fell on him. It was Ribbons. They started wrestling, or it might not have been wrestling. Then Jack Fullbright’s voice said sharply:

“Wait a minute. Shut up, will you? Something’s wrong.”

He stepped over the suddenly stilled bodies on the floor and was framed in the doorway. He wasn’t wearing anything, of course, except the little silver chain around his neck and a wide slice of adhesive tape holding thick folds of gauze over his nose. The tape went far out across his cheekbones. The flesh around his eyes that wasn’t covered by the bandage was black and blue and swollen. He could only open his eyes as slits. They glittered.

“What the hell is this? What do you want?”

He reached around the door for a white terrycloth robe. Ribbons stared amazed at Dave and Delgado between Fulbright’s legs. So did the blond boy. He’d tilted his head far back. That it was upside-down made his alarm look comical. Fullbright stepped out of the sleeping cabin and shut the door. He flapped into the robe. It was floor-length and had a hood. He didn’t put up the hood. Dave studied his motions. They were slow. He had to be full of painkillers. There was no way, without them, that Fullbright could have amused himself as he’d just been doing only a day after smashing his face on those steps. The pills would have hampered his capacities, but Dave suspected it had taken time and diplomacy and luck to set up this date. Fullbright wouldn’t have canceled for anything less than a coma.

“Still the same thing,” Dave said. “To know where Charleen is. You lied before. You knew her. You asked Spence Odum to put her in a film. It would cost you but you didn’t seem to care. She meant something to you. So where is she, Fullbright?”

Beyond the door behind the man in the long white robe there was a rattling noise. Somebody stumbled on stairs. Dave looked a Delgado and Delgado pushed Fullbright aside, yanked open the door to the sleeping cabin, lunged through. Dave saw the boy’s naked legs disappear at the top of a companionway at the far end of the cabin. Delgado had hold of Ribbons. She had on jeans now but no top as yet. She squirmed in Delgado’s grip and let out little gasps with words muffled inside them of fear and outrage. She tried to hit Delgado with little thin blue-veined fists. Beyond the far companionway, there was a splash. The boy must have gone overboard forward.

“I’d like the truth this time,” Dave said.

Fullbright didn’t answer. He watched Delgado bring the struggling, whimpering Ribbons into the after cabin. Delgado set her down hard on the couch. She crossed her arms in front of her little breasts and glared up at Delgado through her tumbled hair. Her mouth pouted.

“I guess you’re going to get it, aren’t you?” Fullbright dropped disgustedly onto the couch opposite Ribbons. “Or you’ll have the vice squad down on me.”

“You’re a poor judge of character,” Dave said. He reached into a pocket and brought out the sheaf of invoices he’d gone off with the last time he left this boat He flipped them at Fullbright “I’m going to get it by offering you these back.”

“Or you’ll take them to the IRS.” Fullbright nodded.

“And the police, and the district attorney, and any other agency I can think of that frowns on theft and cheating and embezzlement—to say nothing of murder.”

Fullbright shut his eyes, shook his head, grunted, slouched down on the couch, hunching up his shoulders. “I didn’t kill him. I felt like it, but I didn’t I figured out another way.” A wise smile twisted his mouth at one corner.

“I’m cold,” Ribbons said.

“To shut him up and back him off,” Dave said, “after he discovered you were renting equipment to porno filmmakers and not even giving him a share of the take.”

“It wasn’t the money,” Fullbright mumbled. “It was the sinfulness of it all. He was going to destroy me.”

Dave stepped to him and shook his shoulder. “Don’t go to sleep on me. Explain this.” He held in front of Fullbright’s face the fuzzy photo of wanton Charleen on the motel-room bed. The slits in the bruised swellings opened for a moment and closed again. “You took it, didn’t you? Don’t tell me why; let me guess. Dawson was with her.”

Fullbright nodded slowly. His voice was almost inaudible now. “You know already. Why ask me?” He raised a very slow hand and very gingerly touched the bandage across his nose. “Leave me alone, all right?”

“I’m cold,” Ribbons whined, and Delgado went into the sleeping cabin and brought back a white Irish hand-knitted sweater. She put it on. It must have belonged to the boy or to Fullbright. It was much too big for her. She huddled down in it, glowering, sulking.

“You’re welcome,” Delgado said.

“I found him looking at magazines in his office one night when” he thought I’d gone home, only I remembered something I needed and I came back.” Fullbright blew out air wearily. “They had pictures of naked little girls in them.” A sound came from Fullbright that was almost a laugh. “He put them away fast and I made believe I hadn’t noticed. It really shocked me.” He looked at Dave for a second and shut his eyes again. “I actually believed the son of a bitch was what he claimed to be. Until then.”

“And he thought you still believed it,” Dave said, “when he went over to Spence Odum’s studio and tore it apart and snatched back all the stuff that belonged to Superstar Rentals. And threatened to wipe you out.”

Fullbright nodded even more slowly this time.

Dave looked at Ribbons. “Take Mr. Delgado to the galley and come back with some coffee, please. On the double, as we say on shipboard.”

Ribbons gave no sign of doing what he asked. Delgado pulled her to her feet. He pushed her ahead of him through the sleeping cabin.

Dave didn’t watch where they went. He asked Fullbright: “You already had Charleen for a little playmate by that time, right? Where did you find her?”

“You wrecked my face,” Fullbright said. “It hurt like hell. I’m full of dope. I can’t go on with this. I can’t figure out what the hell to say.”

“Try the truth,” Dave said.

Fullbright drew a deep breath and pushed himself a little more erect on the couch. He said loudly, “I found her in a place on Sunset called the Strip Joint, where kids dance and drink soda pop and hustle sex for bucks, for pot, for cocaine, for auditions, for whatever you promise them.”