Little Dog Laughed (18 page)

“You should have phoned the police,” Dave said.

“I would have been a corpse by the time they got here,” Gernsbach said. “Terrorists do not let witnesses live.”

“How many were there?” Dave said.

“Three. Young, from the way they moved. Strange. They were dressed for combat, but I saw no guns.”

“Streeter came up with the gun,” Dave said, “which was bad judgment.” He drank off the whiskey and set the glass on the desk. “Call the police now—Jeff Leppard, homicide. You don’t want Mike Underhill to sit on death row for this.”

“It cannot be helped,” Gernsbach said. “If I show my face, those storm troopers will kill me.”

He swung the Jaguar in at an almost empty parking lot beside a white clapboard restaurant with a spouting black whale painted on its side. He got out of the car to take down the gritty receiver of a pay phone in a half booth with sea-fogged glass side panels. He rang his house. No one answered. He rang the television station. Cecil had not been in today. He’d said he was going out of town. Dave scowled at that and hung up. He moved away from the phone, turned back, and punched the number of the east side house.

The sister who cooked so well answered. Had she heard from Porfirio? She answered in Spanish, with tears in her voice, “He has disappeared. She went out to the market, and when she returned he was gone. The neighbors said two men came, in cowboy boots and straw hats, and took him away.”

“In a four-wheel-drive vehicle?” Dave said.

“
Sí
. On big tires. With black glass at the windows. They will kill him, now—no?”

“Maybe not,” Dave said, cold in his belly.

“I have been to the church and have lighted a candle for him,” she said. “One also for you,
señor
.”

“
Gracias
,” he said.

But he would need more help than that. He punched four-one-one, and asked for the number.

F
ORTY-ODD YEARS AGO
he had crammed German at an army language school in downtown L.A. The hours were long. He always left late. The streets were empty at night then. It had felt eerie—that lonely half-mile walk he’d made each midnight to the trolley barn to catch an almost empty big red car to his barracks in South Pasadena. The walk had taken him through the district called Little Tokyo. But the Japanese had all been rounded up and shipped off to internment camps. The shops that had sold fabrics and vases and beautiful cabbages were vacant. Off the boards that blanked their windows, his steps had echoed block after deserted block, loud and strange to his own ears. He hadn’t felt afraid. Who was there to be afraid of? He had felt that he was alone on earth. He felt that way now. Tall glass buildings glowed that hadn’t been here forty-odd years ago. A remote roar of traffic reached him from the freeways that met, knotted, and untangled themselves here at the city’s heart. But no automobiles drove these streets. He saw no human beings. L.A. was a city of the dead at night.

The Grovers was stepped terraces outside, and inside was fumed oak, deep-buttoned leather, thick old mirrors. The light from crystal chandeliers was subdued. The carpets on marble floors and staircases were old, thick, handsome. Palms grew large in brass pots in corners. All sound was muted, the whisper of shuffling cards, the click of billiard balls, the rustle of
Wall Street Journal
pages in the hands of readers in wing chairs, even the rare laughter from the throats of judges, corporate lawyers, millionaire brokers, top management executives, retired generals, celebrated surgeons, overpaid officials and bureaucrats from City Hall, County Courthouse, Federal Building. And from Sacramento—the governor was a member of the Grovers.

Carl Brandstetter had joined in the late 1920s, when Medallion, his life insurance company, had rocketed to success. In 1947, when Dave came back from Europe to join the company, his father had put in his name for membership. He was accepted, but he had scarcely set foot in the place since. A lunch now and then with his father had been the sum of it. Money and power were all they talked about, thought about, cared about here. Not Dave’s subjects. Not then. Not now. Now he was here to call in a marker.

The bar hadn’t changed—dark paneling, dark leathers, a brass foot rail polished to a high sheen. Very old black men tended the long bar. These old men wore white jackets, just as always in the past. How many hundred such jackets had they worn out in their long lifetimes here? He read his watch and hiked himself onto a stool, and one of the old men came creakily to serve him. He had better go on with American whiskey. But not Wild Turkey—the proof was too high. He wanted his wits. It was a very old marker. And he had to drive home afterward. He asked for Jack Daniel’s black.

The bartender peered at him with eyes whose whites were the dulled hue of very old porcelain. “It would be Mr. Brandstetter, is that right? Been a long time since we seen you here, sir.”

“You’re thinking of my father,” Dave said. “He’s no longer living.”

“Oh.” The creases in the black face deepened. “I’m sorry to hear that. Then you’d be—let me see can I remember—David?”

Dave smiled. “You have a wonderful memory.”

“So they tell me,” the bartender said, “but you look a good deal like your father. He was a fine man.” The bartender moved away, and with the studied motions of the very old chose a short sturdy glass of cut Waterford. He dropped ice into this. Then with respect for painful joints and a brittle spine he stooped to lift the square whiskey bottle from its place on a softly lighted glass shelf. He measured whiskey into the glass not with a jigger but by practiced eye. The small paper napkin he laid on the bar was imprinted with the black silhouette of an orange tree that was the emblem of the Grovers and, with all deliberate speed, he set the glass down on the napkin in front of Dave. “Your father was a Scotch drinker,” he said.

“Johnnie Walker,” Dave said. “Rough and tough.”

“I don’t drink myself,” the bartender said, “never did. But I guess each brand is a little different, ain’t it?”

“Very different.” Dave lifted his glass. “Thank you.”

“Nice to have you here.” The old man gave a little bow of his darkly polished bald head with its fringe of white hair, and moved rheumatically away.

It was past dinnertime. Behind him round tables drowsed in candlelight under snowy, heavy linen cloths. In a farther room men played cards at game tables, or sat talking in groups, or reading. In a room farther off still, men bent over billiard tables. Cigar smoke tinged the air. Dave smiled to himself. The aroma was unmistakable—Havana. The members of the Grovers might hate Dr. Castro and all his works, but there was a limit to self-sacrifice. Dave snubbed out his cigarette in a small glass ashtray with the Grovers orange tree stenciled on its bottom, and checked his watch again. He lit another cigarette and slowly finished off the Jack Daniel’s. A light hand touched his shoulder.

“Mr. Brandstetter.” The speaker was a trim young man with a haircut so neat it looked painted on. His clothes were neat, new, and fitted him, but he stood stiffly in them. His face was stiff. His eyes, of no special color, held no special expression, either. He might have been a store-window dummy, except that when Dave nodded he spoke again, politely, but without expression. “Director Summers will see you now. If you’ll come with me, please?” Dave left his cigarette, got off the stool, and followed him past the grand staircase to the elevators. He read his watch again, and smiled. It was precisely ten thirty.

In the elevator—a cage of wrought-iron tracery with a worn brass plate for the worn brass floor buttons, it shuddered upward on ancient cables that flapped in the hollow shaft—Dave thought about Duke Summers. He had read about him now and then in newspapers and magazines, but decades had passed since he’d seen or spoken to him. Would he recognize him now? The young Army attorney Dave remembered was willowy, pretty, rather than handsome, and frightened by an effeminacy as natural to him as breathing. Duke had planned a career that was not going to allow for that.

While they had roomed together, served together in intelligence after the war in Germany, Dave had tried to school him out of his girlish mannerisms. But Duke had compulsions he couldn’t control—to paint his face, to dress in women’s clothes—which he concealed from Dave as from everyone else. Until a night of sleet and rain when Dave had to rescue him from a blue-eyed, blond, blackmailing teenage boy in a Darmstadt alley. Which ought to have taught Duke a lesson—it was a near thing; the MPs almost caught them. It didn’t teach him a lesson. It took a far closer call, a few months later, to do that.

The elevator jerked to an uncertain halt, the young man clattered open the grille gate, pushed the door beyond it, and led Dave down a quiet corridor between fumed oak doors with small brass nameplates. The door he opened for Dave led into a large handsome sitting room. From a good-looking armchair an old man rose, red-faced, jowly, with a white mustache, white eyebrows, a paunch. He wore gray flannel trousers, a dark blue blazer with brass buttons, a raw silk shirt, a silk scarf knotted at the throat, and he came forward with his hand out and a smile of fine dentures.

“Dave!” He roared a laugh whose masculinity would have shamed John Wayne, seized Dave’s hand in a crushing grip, and pumped it hard. “Dave, I can’t believe it.” He wrapped Dave in a bear hug, chortling. He stood Dave at arm’s length, gripping his shoulders. “My God, how long has it been?” None of this surprised Dave. Right out of the Army, Duke had married, and within six years had produced five sturdy children, and had gone on to shape a career even more remarkable than the one he had dreamed of back in Germany. What disturbed Dave was the film of sweat on the great man’s forehead, and how his eyes in their pouches darted this way and that, never settling on him. “Sit down, man, sit down. This is my aide, Bob Shales.” Summers flapped a hand toward a chair and Dave took it. A handshake with Shales didn’t seem indicated. “What will you drink? This calls for a drink, right?”

“Jack Daniel’s,” Dave said to Shales, “thank you.”

Summers swept up a glass of half-melted ice cubes from the table by his chair, handed it to Shales, and settled back as the young man soundlessly left the room. “You look great,” Summers said to Dave. “Done well for yourself, right? Big insurance mogul, isn’t that it? Richest corporations in America. You always did have the smarts.”

“I was a department head,” Dave said, “death-claims investigations. Now I’m a private investigator—same line. It was my father who was the mogul, Duke.”

“You look as if you’re doing all right.” The restless unhappy eyes sized up Dave’s clothes. “You arrived in a Jaguar. You buy your clothes at Brooks Brothers. Those are handmade shoes. Your home in Laurel Canyon assesses at a million two hundred thou.”

“You’ve been checking up,” Dave said. “The house is just a couple of old stables updated. Don’t put too much stock in real estate prices these days.”

“All right. You’re a poverty case. But your bank account says otherwise. Your portfolios.”

“Why did you check up on me, Duke?”

“It’s been forty years. People change. It’s called screening. A routine procedure.” He waved a hand and practiced his avuncular smile. “Don’t feel bad. All kinds of people want me dead. My staff worries about that. I’m like a goddam art masterpiece or something. One that nobody gets to see.”

“I’m honored,” Dave said.

Summers made a sour face. “It gets old sometimes. Especially for the family, you know? Wife and kids. There isn’t a photograph of them in existence, did you know that? They can’t even live in this country. We don’t use the mails. Everything goes by diplomatic courier. Christmas cards, anniversary presents, everything.”

“You wanted to be a great man,” Dave said.

“The young make a lot of mistakes,” Summers grunted.

“Lonely at the top?” Dave said.

Shales came in with very large, squat glasses of ice and whiskey, held the tray for Dave to take his, set Summers’s down under the lamp beside his chair. “Anything else?” he said. And Summers gave him a very different sort of smile—not the public one he’d given Dave, but a private one, full of affection. “That’s all, Bobby, thanks. Good night.”

“Good night, Duke,” Shales said, with a new humanity in his own expression, a note of tenderness in his voice. “Mr. Brandstetter? Nice to have met you.”

“Yes,” Dave said, “good night.” And to Summers, when Shales had gone out and shut the door behind him, “Not so lonely at the top?”

“You know me so well.” Summers laughed, and picked up his glass and held it high. “To old times,” he said, and drank. “You look young, Dave. I never get time to keep in trim.” He studied Dave. “I don’t believe you’ve gained a pound since Berlin.”

“Lost a little,” Dave said, and tasted his whiskey. “I never get time to gain.”

The big manly laugh burst out again. “I often think—do you remember the night we liberated that
Bierhalle
in the basement on Kreutzer Strasse, and the fat woman—”

“I remember breaking into the headquarters of the military police and stealing from the files the record of your arrest in that transvestite bar, so they couldn’t drum you out of the service in disgrace. Do you remember that?”

Some of the claret flush drained from Summers’s bloated face. All the light of laughter left his eyes. The sweat shone on his forehead again. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

“Do you remember that?” Dave said again.

Summers worked his mouth a moment without sound. Then he breathed in deeply through his nose and said crossly, “Yes, yes, of course I remember that. I’ve tried to forget it, but life isn’t that long. What about it?”

“I did it because you were my friend and you needed help. And you were too shattered to do it yourself. You’d given up. Sat there on your cot shivering, drinking. You were done for.”

Summers sulked. “You took an awful chance.”

“Someone had to,” Dave said. “It’s why you’re here.”

Summers peered at him sideways. “You want me to thank you?”

Dave grinned. “You cried on my shoulder in gratitude.”

“I was weepy in those days,” Summers grunted. “A regular girl. What do you want, Dave?”