Death Claims (16 page)

"Yes. No. I don't remember." 

"It was canned roast-beef hash. Neither one of you cleaned up his plate." 

The boy stood. "This was supposed to be about insurance," he said to Campos. "My lawyer told me I didn't have to answer questions." 

"Your lawyer was right." Campos pushed back his chair. Its feet made a rubber stutter on the plastic tiles. He got up, twisted the doorknob, leaned into the hall. "Hayes?" he said. "Libisky?" And the blond boys brought in smells of leather and Lifebuoy soap and took Peter Oats away. 

Dave handed Campos the paper. "This is no good." 

Campos squinted again. "What do you mean?" 

Dave stood up tired. "He wasn't even there." 

"Where was he? Why did he confess?" 

"That's for us to find out," Dave said. 

"Not me," Campos said. "This is tight. The DA likes it. He'll like it even better when he hears about the guitar. And I got ten other things to do."

A
SINGLE SPOTLIGHT
bored a white shaft straight down through the tall blackness of the room. The floor it hit was painted black, so it didn't splash. Only when fat Whittington moved through it in a Russian peasant blouse. Except for red-embroidered hem, collar, cuffs, the blouse was white, and the light struck off it and reflected in the scallops of the varnished wooden seatbacks that boxed in the acting area. 

Whittington stepped out of the light and darker figures flickered through like memories of the dead. Boys, girls, long hair, jeans, jerseys, play books in their hands. Seen. Not seen. Reciting lines, they sounded like lost children crying to each other in a cave. Dave went down the carpet-hushed steps, used a hand to shield his eyes, made out Whittington in a far corner, a swollen moon seen through smoke. He started around the dark margin of the open space. 

Whittington called, "This is where you hear the willow whistle, Natasha. No, don't move-register. Stand very still. Then, as it goes on, lift your head. No, no, darling. Don't gawp at the ceiling. And don't swivel your head. Just lift it. Slowly. An inch, two inches, so you're staring over the audience. No, no. No expression. Blankly. That's it. All right. Now. . . ." His voice took a different direction. 

"The whistle stops and Ivan and Marya start to laugh. Lightly. Pleased with each other. Ivan, you enter, holding both of Marya's hands, leading her, both of you still laughing. No, backward, Ivan, backward-don't you remember? So that Marya sees Natasha before you do. She's facing her. Go out and come in again." He looked at Dave. "Not now. I'm rehearsing." 

"I can see what you're doing. I can't see what Peter Oats is doing." 

"I told you the last time—I'd hoped it would be the last time—that I don't know where he is." 

"That's not the problem anymore," Dave said. 

"It never was my problem." Whittington folded his arms across the fat span of his chest and turned to watch the youngsters moving in the chiaroscuro. The Natasha girl began to cry. 

Dave said, "He's locked up. He says he killed his father." 

"What?" Whittington wheeled his big bulk around. His mouth was a slack gap of shadow in the blurred, pale bloat of his face. "What did you say?" 

"You heard me," Dave said. 

Whittington banged his hands together. It was a loud sound to come from a couple of pillows. The Marya girl was doing a mean little crab dance around the Natasha girl. She'd started to sing. She stopped with a little shriek. Laughter from the dark. Someone blew a slide whistle. It sounded surprised. Whittington told them, "I think the coffee must be ready." 

He led Dave around the black partition and down the long room of Beaverboard booths and costume racks. At its end, on a packing-crate table, the big shiny coffeemaker Dave had seen last time in the lobby showed a little red light and made stomach noises. Cellophane bags of cookies and midget doughnuts waited beside it with sugar, powdered milk substitute, a box of wooden stirring sticks. As if turned loose by Plato, the cave children came out of the dark blinking and swarmed happily at the packing case. Whittington led Dave outdoors where clean sunlight fell through the brushy leafage of giant eucalypts. Then he halted and half turned back. 

"Did you want coffee?" The offer was mechanical. 

Dave shook his head. 

Whittington frowned. "Killed his father? You said his father drowned." 

Dave told him what was in the confession. "His father wasn't a big man. The boy could have done it—if he knew the fireman's carry." 

"He knew it." Whittington sounded numb. A few feet off stood a ten-year-old Bentley convertible that needed a wash and a new top because the old one was gray rags. Whittington had lost his light-footedness. He trudged heavily across ground carpeted in brittle red leaves and leaned back against a dented fender. "I taught him myself. For a war play. He had to lift a black boy almost twice his weight." 

Dave went to him. "And while there was rain that night, there was no wind to speak of. The sea wasn't rough. If he swam well—" 

"Like a seal. But kill?" Whittington frowned, gave his big head a shake. A strand of pale red hair fell over an ear. "He couldn't. And his father? He adored his father. Charming man. I met him one night. Terribly disfigured. But after a minute you didn't notice. Later you remember him as handsome. Of course, Peter had to get his beauty from somewhere. Why would he kill him?" 

"The answer that leaps to mind," Dave said, "is for twenty thousand dollars in life insurance. That night was his last chance at it. It was the only money his father had to leave. Somehow, through all his disasters, he'd kept up payments on that policy. And now he was going to cut Peter out. I don't know for whom. Probably April Stannard." 

"Pretty girl," Whittington said. "I gather she and John Oats were much in love." 

"Also she'd sold most of what she owned to pay his medical bills. And looked after him, housed him, fed him. Facts Peter knew. And she'd been good to Peter too.'' 

"He liked her." Whittington nodded. "And he had a great sense of fairness. I can't see him wanting that money. Not really. Money didn't mean anything to him. Do you know what I often said to him? That in another time, another period of history, he'd have been a saint. It's only that they've gone out of style. There are no jobs for saints anymore." 

"I'm not so sure," Dave said. "I talked to him this morning and he said the money didn't matter and I think he meant it. I don't think it ever mattered. Not to him." He looked hard at Whittington. "How much did he love you?" 

Whittington's big face reddened. His voice went cold. "How are you using that word?" 

"You define it," Dave said. "You were together constantly since last June. You kept his picture by your bed. You took a projector full of color slides of him. Before he had enough training you cast him in a big role in a moth-eaten costume drama nobody would stage anymore except to show off a pretty boy in tights. He was always here, hardly ever at home. His family, his friends thought he was obsessed with theatre. Was it theatre or was it you?" 

Whittington straightened, swelled. "Now, you listen to me. I told you the other morning—" 

"I'm more interested in what you didn't tell me. That the city has cut back your funds and that you're keeping the place going out of your own pocket. And that the pocket is nearly empty." 

"And just how"—Whittington tried to sound steely, but he was pale—"is that supposed to involve Peter?" 

"Twenty thousand dollars should cover operating expenses here for quite a time." 

Whittington stared. "You are out of your mind." 

"I don't think so. Peter worshiped his father. Everyone says so. They were inseparable. Yet he left him. Flat. Very suddenly. No one knows why. But I think I can guess. John Oats had become a morphine addict. It changed him. He was blackmailing former friends. He even tried to steal from a store. Peter found out about it. It hit him hard. All that love wouldn't just go away. It would turn into something else. 

"What if it turned into contempt? What if it seemed to him his father didn't matter anymore? And that you did? You loved him. A brilliant man, a famous man. Petted him, flattered him. And you were doing something, something fine he believed in, or thought he believed in. And for lack of money it was going to come to an end. His father was no good anymore, not to himself, not to anyone else. Why not have that money?" 

"You," Whittington said, "are incredible." 

"The setup here the other morning"—Dave jerked his head to indicate the narrow windows of the apartment visible through the treetops—"didn't demand much of the imagination. That boy in your bed wasn't Peter Oats, but he might have been. He was no nephew. He knew I knew that. And he knew how I knew it." 

Whittington's brows rose. "Did he? Shrewd child. I marvel. All right. Yes, I wanted Peter in my bed. Wouldn't you? But hints and gallantries made no impression. So I staged
Lorenzaccio
for him. He was oblivious. I lost patience and spoke my mind. No. He hated to hurt me, I'd been kind, he liked me. But no. And—we didn't speak after that. The play closed and he didn't come back. Ever. If you don't believe me"—he nodded toward the mill door —"ask any of them. They talked of nothing else for a week.'' 

"You said he was straight. Was he?" 

Whittington pushed heavily away from the fender. "At the end, in my pain, I asked him. A mistake. I knew he made a fetish of honesty. He told me. No, he wasn't straight. As you can imagine"—Whittington brushed grit from his hands—"that made his refusal easier to take." 

Arena Blanca still looked bleak. The cheery paint on the old houses, the glitter of the blue bay, the keen whiteness of the sand were lonely. The trim boats at the jetties waited like blind classroom kids, arms raised, with no teacher to turn them loose. Gulls, slicing the sunlight, were all that seemed alive. The weary lift door on the car stalls under the pink house still gaped. But the old station wagon was gone. 

At the top of the shaky stairs he worked the buzzer and waited. No one came. He stepped off the worn rope doormat and lifted it. A shower of sand. He looked along the outer edges of the pinkpainted doorframe. For a small nail. There was no small nail. He stretched to run a hand along the top of the frame. The key had lain there for a long time. It was crusty. But it went into the lock all right. It turned the lock. He pushed the door and went inside, where the curtains this time were open to the blue stare of empty bay and sky. 

She'd kept at her cleaning. The room looked the way it must have looked in her mother's day, the spooled maple glossy, the chintz slipcovers straight, even a bowl of flowers on the coffee table, California poppies, yolk yellow. A place for everything and everything in its place. Except
Cook's Voyages
. They still leaned like dark old tombstones at the foot of the wall of books. He opened the door in that wall. 

Not far. It hit something and stopped. He edged through. What it had hit was another door hanging open. To a closet. He'd wanted to find that. He peered in. The jacket hung there, among others, the corduroy one, cuffs still turned back four inches as they'd been when she wore it the other night. It was exactly like the one Peter Oats was wearing, lined with the same gold check pattern. He crouched. On the closet floor, among other dusty gleams of leather, stood a pair of short boots. Same heavy straps and brass ring fastenings as Peter's. In his head he heard Eve Oats's voice:
They thought alike, moved alike, spoke alike, looked alike
. He shut the closet door. 

The room was just big enough for a double bed, a chest of drawers, a desk and chair. And that was what was in it. All of it maple. The surfaces shone. A fresh white candlewick spread was smooth on the bed. On the chest with a chased silver comb, brush, looking-glass was a standing photo in a chased silver frame. A smiling man and woman at the rail of a ship, a thin blonde girl child between them, clutching a book and screwing up her face in the bright sun. 

Except for a black portable typewriter case with frayed corners, the desktop was empty. But the drawers weren't. They weren't tidy, either. At least not the ones he opened, the top ones. What had lain on the desk had simply been pushed off into them—bills, empty envelopes, fliers, blue-chip stamps, pencils, ballpoint pens, limp rubber bands, bent paperclips, some dog-eared snapshots. And notes on scraps of paper. 

He put on his glasses, sat down, sorted the scraps. Dusty to the touch. Lists—
milk
,
tomato soup
,
Spam
,
cigarettes
. Book titles. Some nineteenth-century dates. A lengthy addition problem in pounds, shillings, pence, the total converted to dollars, many dollars. The phone number of a roofing company. Dave glanced up. The ceiling was rain-stained. He smiled. He stopped smiling. 

His fingers held a stiff yellow subscription blank torn raggedly along the perforated edge that had held it in a magazine. The blanks hadn't been filled in, but on the side with the printed return address was written
Peter
. And under the name was a phone number. He remembered the number because it had been hard to get. It was the number of Wade Cochran's ranch. 

He thumbed through the snapshots. They were all of Peter. But only two were recent and one of those was blurred. He slid the clear one into a pocket along with the subscription card. He put away his glasses, pawed the stuff back into the drawers, shut the drawers. He set the chair back, put the key where he'd found it. He went away.

T
HE PINK STATION
wagon stood drab in the sun on the blacktop oblong of the shopping center. He was moving fast when he noticed it. But the highway was empty. With a squeal of tires, he slewed the company car around and went back. He parked without worrying about the white lines and walked fast along the strip of cement that margined the shops, frowning through the sun-glaring plate-glass fronts. 

She was at a checkstand in the Safeway. Jeans, Navy-surplus pullover, hair tucked up under a dark knittedcap. Boyish. He pushed inside, walked to the end of the counter where a wide black belt was bringing the items out of her shopping cart. Not many and not expensive. Just the same, she watched the cashregister tally anxiously while a stout, gray-haired black woman in a red smock worked the keys.