Skinflick (5 page)

Fullbright left the door open. He didn’t go back to his office. He went with the bald man into the storeroom.

The checks were in the envelopes the bank had mailed them in. The bundles for each month were wrapped in blue and white statement sheets. The one for seven hundred dollars and the one for three hundred fifty were both written to a Sylvia Katzman. The rubber stamps on the back in red said hers was a Proctor Bank account, Westwood branch. Dave put the checks back and shut the file drawer.

“Thanks,” he said to the secretary.

She was talking into her phone. She waved a ball-point pen at him without looking up.

In the storeroom, the bald man was on his knees, working up a sweat, grappling with some heavy piece of equipment on a lower shelf. Fullbright stood over him, reading the crumpled manifest in his hand. Dave asked him:

“Did Dawson have a young customer with a black beard who drove a big pickup truck, machinery in the back?”

“If he did,” Fullbright grunted, “I never saw him.”

“Thanks,” Dave said.

A
T THE DARK LITTLE
bar, he used Max Romano’s phone to reach Mel Fleischer at Proctor Bank headquarters. And to find Amanda where he feared he’d find her, moping around that big, beautiful, blank house in Beverly Glen, needing somebody to get her off dead center. He’d failed before. This time she said she’d come. She came. She stood blinded in the shadowy restaurant after the savagery of the street glare, swaying a little, afraid to take a step. She too wore one of those wrinkled, blowsy, loose-woven cotton tops over knickers and knee boots. From her shoulder hung a straw bag that matched the floppy sun hat on her dark, wing-smooth hair. Max, bald and pudgy, arm loaded with menus, waddled to her and spoke to her, probably gentle words about Carl Brandstetter’s death. And she saw Dave and came on, doing her best to smile. It was going to take more practice. Dave got off his stool to move the next one for her.

“You look great,” he said.

“I feel forlorn,” she said. “I hate it when people go away and don’t come back.” The bartender raised eyebrows at her and she nodded at Dave’s drink. “But what right have I got to mourn to you? I have only a year’s worth of memories to ache over. You’ve got a lifetime’s.”

“You couldn’t help it,” he said. “Nobody could. It was going to happen and it happened. You’re young. Start over.”

“I keep walking in circles,” she said, “like something sad in a zoo. Only sadder.”

“No. You’ve got the key. Open the cage. Go.”

“Where?” Bleakly she rummaged in the straw bag. Cigarettes came out, the thin, long, brown kind. She set one in her mouth and pushed the pack at Dave. He took one and lit hers and his with the thin steel lighter. “At least when I’m home, I see him, I hear him. This room, that room, out by the pool. I hear that laugh of his. He makes a loud ghost.”

“You can turn into a ghost yourself that way,” Dave said. He watched the bartender set a glass in front of her. He took the ticket. “I know. I went through it a couple of years ago. Till I got out of the house we’d shared, I couldn’t function. Even after I found somebody alive and he came in and rattled around in the kitchen and slept in the bed with me, it was no good.”

“Doug?” she said. And answered her own question with a nod. “Yes, Doug. And now he never knows where you are when I ring you up.” She tasted the drink.

“He never knew where I was before,” Dave said.

“You’re breaking up,” she said. “And you’re ‘no longer with us’ when I call your office at Medallion.”

“I got out of there before they threw me out,” he said. “With no time to spare. Walking through that tenth floor the day after he died was like swimming through a school of great white sharks. Vice presidents.”

She peered at him. “You’re joking. Aren’t you? I mean, why? Why would they throw you out?”

“Bad employment risk.” He tilted up his glass and let the ice rattle against his mouth. “Untrustworthy.”

“But you were there for years!” she protested.

“Forever,” he said. “Shall we eat?”

In drum chairs upholstered in black crushed velvet at a table where a candle flickered in a tubby amber chimney, she laid down the big, floppy menu. “Don’t you own stock? I thought Carl said—”

“Enough so I won’t starve,” he said, “but not fifty-one percent.” He put on shell-rim half-moon glasses to read the menu and wondered if the cold salmon was fresh. “Not enough to control policy. Carl had the fifty-one percent. But it won’t stay in a block. Not now. The widows will get it. Sorry.”

“Not this one,” she said. “A house worth conservatively a quarter of a million dollars, and two expensive automobiles. One. The Bentley was totaled. He didn’t leave them the shares.”

“They’ll get them in court,” Dave said. “That’s the kind of lady he married. Present company excepted. And Lisa, possibly. And probably Helena—she already owns two hundred racehorses and half Ventura County.” He laid aside the menu, took off the reading glasses, and tucked them into his pocket. “The stuffed flounder is reliable.”

“I’ll have the stuffed flounder, then,” she said. “You come here a lot, don’t you?”

“Since Max had a full head of hair,” Dave said. “Nineteen forty-eight. That would be well before you were born.” He looked around. “Maybe I’ll stop, now. One ghost too many, I think.”

“We were here one night with that police lieutenant. Mr. Barker. He said you were the best in the business. How could they fire you?”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Dave said.

“Carl said so too.” She swallowed some of her drink. “And I’ve read clippings.
Newsweek. The New York Times Magazine. People.
”

“Dear God,” Dave said. “Did he keep clippings? The sentimental old bastard. I never knew that.”

“He thought the world of you,” she said.

“Please stop,” he said. And Max touched his shoulder and set a French boudoir telephone on the table and crouched with a grunt to plug it in. Dave picked up the receiver, looking
excuse me
at Amanda. In his ear, Mel Fleischer said, “Sylvia Katzman lives in one of thirty-eight units she owns up above the Sunset Strip.” He read off the address. “How’s Doug? Gallery beginning to pay its way?” Doug sold pictures, sculpture, and pottery on Robertson where everyone else sold antiques. Mel Fleischer collected California painters of the twenties and thirties. He owned more Millard Sheets pictures than anyone else. Mel said, “Has he tracked down that Redmond for me, yet? It’s a grisaille of eucalyptus trees by a pond. Some detective-story writer owned it who died. Is the will out of probate yet?”

“You’ve got me,” Dave said. “Doug doesn’t talk to me a whole hell of a lot. He talks French to a Polynesian princess called Christian Jacques who runs a restaurant across from the gallery. If you can’t reach him at home, try the Bamboo Raft.”

“Oh, is that how it is?” Mel said. “Listen, I was so sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “Look, I want to buy you dinner for this. Tonight? Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow. And can it be for two?” Mel asked. “And Japanese? I mean, who can stand all that vinegar and raw fish? But there’s this adorable boy who can’t seem to stop creeping into my rickety old couch of pain. And wherever I go, I glance over my stooped and aged shoulder, and there he is, with longing in his almond eyes. Of course, I’m going to wake up and it will all be a dream. He’s all of twenty-two. Can you feature it?”

“Bring him along,” Dave said.

“He wears happy coats,” Mel said. “You know, the short ones that come about to here? ‘Happy’ is hardly the word. Would you accept ‘hysterical’?”

“In your case, yes,” Dave said. “Make it Noguchi’s on Sawtelle Boulevard. That’s just above Venice. About eight o’clock? And, hey—thanks for Sylvia Katzman.”

“I have a feeling she won’t thank me,” Mel said.

“I won’t mention your name,” Dave said. “That way, she can’t send you poison-pen letters from Tehachapi.”

“Bless you,” Mel said. “See you tomorrow night.”

Dave hung up. He said to Amanda, “Clippings don’t mean a damn to vice presidents. They can’t read.”

“What you’re saying is,” she said, “that they always wanted you out, but they couldn’t do anything about it while Carl was alive.”

“He warned me,” Dave said. “There’s an annual prize given to the biggest fag-haters. The front-runners are always the same—police departments large and small; governments federal, state, and local; the Florida orange-juice crowd; the army, navy, and marines; homosexuals themselves; and insurance companies. Only the last two are not sucker bets. And the insurance companies always win. Everything.”

“Like the Las Vegas casinos?” she said.

“Penny-ante stuff,” Dave said. “The casinos have to play fair. Who ever heard of an insurance company playing fair? When they don’t like the odds, they cancel out.”

“You’re strange.” She blinked through the cigarette smoke that curled lazily around the candle chimney. “Why did you stay in the business if you hate it so? Because of Carl? It was all right if it was him doing it?”

“My part was to play straight in a vicious game,” he said. “I liked it. I still do. That’s why I’m not quitting. I’m one of the lucky people getting paid to do what I love to do. Almost no one manages that in this life. Oh, I’d rather have written a good string quartet I couldn’t write even a bad string quartet.”

A waiter in a black velvet jacket took their orders.

“I’m not good at anything,” Amanda said.

“You decorated that house,” Dave said. “They had it in
Home
magazine. Why don’t you set up shop on Rodeo? Better still why don’t you decorate my new place for me? As of day before yesterday, it’s all mine, the bank says.”

“You make me dizzy,” she said.

“Not so dizzy as walking around in circles feeling sorry for yourself,” Dave said. “We’ll go there after lunch. All right? Get ready for a challenge.”

“You’re working,” she said. “You mustn’t feel you have to give me occupational therapy.”

“Gerald Dawson isn’t going to get any deader,” Dave said. “And his wife and son aren’t going to run away. If I were them I would but they won’t.”

“What kind of place have you found?” she asked.

“I think the former owner was a wolf in a grandmother’s nightcap,” Dave said.

He took three wrong turnings up shaggy Laurel Canyon before he found the right one. He’d only been twice before. And his mind was on Jack Fullbright. When Dave had gone back out to the sizzling parking lot, he’d seen Fullbright loading a cardboard carton full of files into the hatchback of a flame-painted Datsun 260Z. What for? Was it regular? Fullbright’s clothes, suntan, manner, car, didn’t belong to the image of a man who took the office home with him. Didn’t the police case file on the Dawson murder say Fullbright lived on a power launch at the marina? But how had Dave put the wind up him? By asking to see into the files? Which meant to Fullbright he might ask again? So Fullbright removed what he didn’t want seen? What? Why?

The road was called Horseshoe Canyon and it was steep and only one car wide, and the blacktop was gray with age and had potholes that were almost craters. The Electra lurched and scraped bottom, climbing. Back of him, he saw in his mirrors Amanda’s Bugatti managing the climb nimbly as a spider. The Electra was so long it was hard to get it to turn in at the wrecked driveway that dropped down to the house, which crouched, all weathered brown shingles, under ragged pines and eucalyptus. Actually it was three buildings joined by roofs. He got out of the Electra. Amanda got out of the Bugatti and said:

“Yes, well—you’ll want gardeners right away, won’t you?” She crunched across shed needles, leaves, peeled bark. “French doors all the way across. That’s nice.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Dave said, and led her around to the courtyard, where a wide-spreading old live oak sheltered paving whose square red tiles had sunk and tilted and made treacherous footing. A broad, heavy door, squared off in glass panes, opened onto a single wood-walled room crossed by big beams under a pitched roof. “Thirty-six feet by twenty-two feet. How about that?”

“It’s glorious,” she said. But she frowned at the fieldstone fireplace at the end. “That’s a bit stingy, isn’t it? And the materials are wrong. And it’s the wrong shape. What do you say to something about this wide”—she stretched her arms—“with a raised hearth? Secondhand brick, no?”

“I don’t have to say anything,” Dave said. “You say.”

She cocked her head at him, and her little smile said she couldn’t quite believe her luck. She shrugged, took off the hat, and pirouetted slowly, looking the room over. “It’s so California,” she said. She rubbed a circle in the dust of a windowpane to see out. She said, “You don’t want to cut all those marvelous trees. They’re so right for the place. It’s John Muir, isn’t it, John Burroughs, Joaquin Miller?”

“With smog,” he said.

She ignored that, took steps backward, frowning up, nibbling her lip. “But they do make it dark. What do you say to clerestory windows above the French doors?”

“Raise the roof, kid,” he said. “The shop on Rodeo was a good idea. You spend other people’s money with grace and abandon. They’ll love you in Beverly Hills.”

She blinked at him. “Those tainted shares?”

“Hey,” he said. “Do it Start today. Only first, come look at the cookhouse.”

But an engine roared outside. Amanda turned again to peer through the glass. “You’ve got visitors,” she said.

They went back out to the cars. A tow truck tilted backward down off the potholed trail. A leathery man in greasy coveralls was squatting to fasten the winch hook under the back of the Electra. When he saw Dave, he took a folded paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to him. “Brandstetter?” he said.

“Right. But I didn’t call you.”

“It’s Medallion Life Insurance.” The voice belonged to a boy with yellow rag-doll hair in the cab of the wrecker. “It’s a company car. You don’t work for them anymore. They want their car back.”

Amanda stared at Dave. He grinned.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I honest to Christ forgot. This is the twelfth or thirteenth one. It got to be a habit I haven’t driven a car that belonged to me in my entire life.” He laughed and lifted a hand to the tow-truck man. “Take her away, friend.”