Fadeout (19 page)

The boy sat in the shiny wheelchair. Still dressed. His face was white with tiredness. Dave rapped the glass. The beautiful head came around in an agonized twist and after a blank second a smile of recognition worked the mouth. But the rain-colored eyes didn't smile. They were frantic. The window lacked half an inch of being shut. Dave wedged his fingers under. It went up easily but started down again right away, shuddering in the crooked frame. It made climbing through awkward. His knee toppled a stack of paperback books. 

"What goes on? I thought your bedtime was nine." 

"It is. Look . . . can I ask you . . ." The young face colored. "I . . . need to go to . . ." 

"The bathroom," Dave said. "Sure." 

He pushed the wheelchair. When he had the boy set on the fixture, he went through the house. Angry, moving fast. In the front room he found Mildred Mundy. She was sprawled face down on the sofa in her pink kimono. A wine bottle had dropped from her puffy fingers. It lay on the braided rug. Some of the contents had spilled. The room stank of muscatel. He shook her. The loose flesh shuddered but the bloated face was inert. Saliva ran from a corner of her mouth. She wouldn't be any good—not for hours. The television was on. No sound. Just the picture. An old gangster movie. He shut it off and returned to the bathroom. Getting the pants back up the sad useless little legs, setting the boy back in the wheelchair, he grated: 

"Where the hell is your brother? Where's Gretchen? How could they do this to you?" 

"Gretchen didn't... know . . . Mama had. mon . . . ey for wine. If she . . . does . . . n't . have wine . . . she's all . . . right." 

Dave found pajamas on a hook on the inside of the closet door. He laid them on the bed and began helping Buddy off with his sweatshirt. This wasn't the bright-red company one. This one was gray, much washed, much mended. Getting it off wasn't easy. But they managed. Getting the pajama top on was even harder. But the boy was stoic with the spindly arms that wouldn't move where he asked them to, the shining head that refused to hold still on its frail childish neck. And if Buddy had the patience for a lifetime of this, Dave had it for one night. The pajama pants were easier. And there was no problem about lifting him into bed. He weighed next to nothing. 

In the time it took, Dave learned that Mama got the money for wine in nickels and pennies from the grocery change. Phil and Gretchen both worked. They had to let her do at least some of the shopping. She hid the coins sly places until she had sixty-nine cents. Then, when they turned their backs, she got her bottle. Once she had it, you couldn't take it away from her. The times they'd tried, she'd been too terrible. Broke things, burned things. You had to let her drink it. But . . . she didn't always drink. Only sometimes. When she was upset. 

"What's upset her now? Fox Olson's death?" He said it harshly and wished he hadn't because it made the boy close his eyes as if he'd been slapped. But they were clear when he opened them. He knew how to handle hurt. 

"No," he said. "Some ... thing's wr ... ong with Phil." Phil had been tense, worried, not eating. Short-tempered too. He'd sworn at his mother, snarled at Buddy, slapped Gretchen. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn't home much. He waited for the mail each morning. "He's ex . . . pecting some . . . thing that . . . does . . . n't come." 

"It will be addressed to Gretchen when it does," Dave said grimly. 

"You mean," Buddy asked, "Fox's ... life in ... surance?" 

Dave nodded. "Go on. What happens after the mail?" 

"He works . . . at Chal . . . mers Con . . . struc ... tion Company." There was pride in Buddy's eyes. "He's the . . . chief ac . . . count . . . ant." After five he went to the apartment he was building. He worked every evening there. And weekends. Last night he hadn't come home till two. That was why Gretchen wasn't here now. She said he was making himself sick with overwork. She'd gone to get him, make him come home. "But that . . . was hours . . . ago." 

The sheet was clean but tired and patched. The blankets were thin cotton. He tucked them around the boy's shoulders. The cheap metal reflector lamp stood on the worktable shining on a plastic hot-rod model only partly assembled. Dave turned off the lamp. 

"Where is this apartment?" 

"Ar ... royo Str ... eet. Two elev ... en." 

"Thanks. You want this door open or shut?" 

"Shut, pl ... ease." But would Dave leave the bathroom light on and the door open? SometimesMama needed it in the night. She got sick. "But . . . this morn . . . ing it was Phil. When the news . . . came on the tele . . . vision . . . that Mr. Chal . . . mers was dead . . . Phil got ver . . . y . . . sick." 

Arroyo Street was an unlighted strip of blacktop between orange groves, the trees sprawling, neglected. At places they'd been bulldozed out to make lots for houses not yet built. There were no sidewalks. Brush edged the tarmac. At crossroads, clumps of eucalyptus towered, shaggy black against the sky. Not much farther and Arroyo Street would end. At the river. He slowed to tum around. Then he saw the apartment. 

Raw new, two-story, wrapped in tar paper and chicken wire, it was scaffolded around by two-by-fours and planks. A hot naked worklight hung from a rafter end at a corner of the roof. It glared on Phil Mundy. Stripped to the waist, slick with sweat, he troweled and spread green stucco. Relentless, desperate. The scaffold shuddered. Below him on ground littered with lumber scraps, sand, bent nails and sawdust, a noisy one-cylinder gas motor turned the dribbling barrel of a mixer. Frail and incongruous in a minidress with swirls of bright color, Gretchen hauled a heavy bucket up a ladder. 

"Phil," she shouted above the pop and splutter of the mixer, "please, Phil, I can't. I just can't. You've got to quit now. You can't do it all." 

He heard her but he didn't pay any attention. Blankeyed, completely self-absorbed, he knelt and reached down and grabbed the full bucket by its handle and pushed an empty one at her and got up and swung at the wall again. She came down drooping, head hanging, and stumbled toward the mixer. Dave went to her. 

"Did you get a letter from your father? Wednesday morning?" 

She was too tired to be startled. Her eyes were dull. She shook her head numbly. She said, "Have you brought the insurance check? Fox is dead now. You know that." She looked up at Phil, squinting her eyes against the blaze of light. 

The bright torso moved, stooped, straightened, swung. The stucco grated under the trowel. Green blotted out the tar paper in wide, curved swaths. Like a flag of truce, a shirt hung from the scaffold. Dave looked around for a jacket. It was hunched on a handle of an upended wheel.. barrow. There was a dim, chalky line across its front. He said to Gretchen: 

"You'd better go home. Your mother-in-law's passed out, courtesy Gallo Brothers. Someone should be there with Buddy." 

"Oh, God." She picked up a flame-colored coat from a sawhorse. "Thanks. How did you know?" 

"I'm tracing some letters your father wrote. Your mother got one. Hap Loomis got one. I thought you might have. I went to your house to ask." He told her what he'd found. "Go along. I'll talk Phil down."

Her smile was hopeless. "You're a nice man, but I doubt you can do that. Not without the check. I ... " The smile died completely. "I'm afraid he's . . . like, cracking up, Mr. Brandstetter. I'm kind of frightened." 

"Is he trying to finish the place single-handed?" 

"He had to let the crew go. No money to pay them. Oh, he kept one man. But he won't work twenty-four hours a day. Phil's trying. But it's killing him. He was white as a ghost when he got home last night. Two A.M. Just before"—she looked away into the darkness—"Captain Herrera came about Fox." There was an ache in her voice. 

"Go home." Dave took the coat out of her hands and hung it on her shoulders. "If your mother-in-law should half wake up and try to smoke a cigarette ... " 

"I'm going." But she held on a moment, gazing up at him, troubled. A lot of questions were in her eyes. She was too tired to ask them. When she turned to call to Phil, Dave said: 

"He can't hear you. I'll explain. Run along." 

She went, tottering in ridiculous pointed-toed, flame-colored shoes. A minute after the car's taillights faded among the orange trees, Phil turned and slammed the trowel into the empty pail. He scowled into the dark. 

"God damn it, Gretchen, where's the next bucket?" 

Dave found the switch. The mixer motor banged, coughed and quit. "No more buckets," Dave said into the silence. "Come down, Mundy. It's allover." 

Phil stood very still. "Who is that? Where's . . . ?" Then, expressionless, he moved, quick and sure, along the shaky plank to the ladder. He came down it fast and easy. He didn't look at Dave. He headed for the machine. "You shouldn't have stopped it. I've got a lot more to do." He reached for the flywheel. 

Dave caught his arm. "Too much," he said. "You've run out of time. Anybody in his right mind would have left town hours ago. No forwarding address." 

Phil didn't hear him. "Before it rains again." 

"I'll see they get the word." 

"Who?" Dully, still staring at the machine. 

"Whoever takes over. Chalmers Company, I expect." 

"He's dead," Phil said. "Where's . . . Gretchen?" 

"Your mother's drunk again. I sent Gretchen home to look after Buddy. I would have sent her home anyway. She wouldn't want to hear this." 

For the first time Phil looked at Dave. With a kid's face waking. "Hear what?" 

"The true story of Phil Mundy. Who hated being the bastard son of the town's wartime glad girl. Who had brains and ambition. Not too much of the first, far too much of the second. Who was going to show them all. Who was going to beat the man he worked for at his own game. Who married what he thought was a lot of money, only to find out her grandfather wasn't about to part with any of it. Not to Phil Mundy, the boy who was smart with figures. Nor her father either." 

"Fox would," Phil said. "He would have. It was Thorne. She hated me for marrying Gretchen. Fox was the only one in my life who didn't spit on me." 

"So you couldn't get the money you thought you'd married. And you were in trouble. Because to start this place—to show Gretchen what a fireball she'd be getting if she married you—to start this place you embezzled money from Chalmers. Right? I don't know how much, but too much for you to replace on your own hook." 

"They'll tell you," Phil said in a dead boy voice. He sat down on the hard gray tire of the mixer. "Tomorrow. The state auditors. They wouldn't have been in for another six weeks. If Lloyd hadn't been killed." He hung his head again. 

"It made you very sick, didn't it," Dave said. "Learning you were going to get caught just after you'd made sure of the money. By killing Fox Olson." 

Phil's head snapped up. Panic in the blue eyes, dumb panic. "I didn't. I never did." 

"You intercepted a letter from him meant for Gretchen. I don't know all that was in it. But one thing I'm sure of. His address was in it . . . his address in Bell Beach. Much as he probably wanted to—I gather he was a goodhearted guy—he couldn't give you the money living. But dead he was worth fifty thousand dollars to you." 

"No." Phil stood up. "No. You can't prove it." 

"There's a mark on your jacket, where you leaned on the rail of the pier to throw the gun in the water. The paint is old. It's flaking off. And you tracked sawdust there. Police labs can get you coming and going." 

Phil's eyes were almost empty now. The hard, sweated muscles hung like meat in a market. The words fell out of a loose mouth. "He was going to kill himself anyway. That was why he had the gun out, cleaning it. He felt good when I came. He thought nobody gave a damn. 'Let's get out of this room,' he said, 'let's take a walk,' and he put a note on the door. I put the gun in my pocket. . . . He was going to kill himself anyway." 

"So that made it all right?" 

The intelligence went away. "I didn't do it." Then, very fast and very surprisingly, there was a hatchet in his hand. He squatted for it, came up with it and swung it at Dave's head in the same single motion. Dave ducked, rammed his head into the boy's belly, grabbed his knees, lifted. Phil's head slammed back against the mixer barrel. Dave felt him go limp. The little ax dropped. The boy slumped to the ground. 

Dave tied him up with surveyor's twine and went to get Herrera. 

He reached home at seven, dropped his clothes, fell into bed. He expected nightmares. None' came. Maybe because they couldn't hope to compete with actual persons living and dead. He woke with afternoon sun in his face. He wasn't alone. Anselmo lay next to him, small, naked, warm. He had wanted twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep. He ought to have repossessed that key. Anselmo kissed him with a hungry child's mouth. He still smelled of incense. 

"You need a shave," he said. 

Dave muttered, "Surgery patients get shaved. Not rape victims." Numb with sleep he turned, took the boy in his arms, returned the kiss. "This is a mistake, Anselmo. I warned you before." 

"I got a very hard head." Anselmo laughed softly. He propped himself on an elbow and looked down into Dave's face with black solemn eyes. "Don't worry about it. I got to do it with you once. I got to. After that you can say no, if you want to." 

"Oh, sure." Dave nodded gravely. "It will be much easier then." 

"Aw ... " Anselmo lowered dark lashes. His small finger traced a circle in the hair on Dave's chest. "I don't mean to be bad for you." 

"Go ahead." Dave pulled him down. "Be bad for me." 

Anselmo was in the shower and Dave was shaving when the doorbell buzzed. He was naked. He grabbed a flannel shirt and tucked its tails into old corduroys and went to the door barefooted. It could only be Madge. Her feelings wouldn't be hurt if he ran her off on some pretext. It was Madge. But not only. 

"Davey?" She breezed in, pulling off gloves. Smart in lean Scotch tweed. "It's cocktail time. And this is Miss Levy." 

Miss Levy was a surprise. She fit exactly Dave's twentyyear prescription for what ailed Madge. She was past thirtyfive, plain and slightly cross-eyed. But she had a nice smile and good taste in clothes and after she'd shaken Dave's hand her gaze went to the books and records. Knowingly.