Troublemaker (15 page)

"You
were
a lawyer," Yoshiba said, "but that was in Texas and some time ago." He leafed over a Xeroxed record file. "You were disbarred in 1957. For bribing jurors. You served time for it." He sat back, laid a hand on the file, blinked through the desk light. "You served time pretty often. Didn't anybody ever tell you the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?"

"Man don't need no lawyer that tells the simple truth." Huncie shifted a lump of tobacco from one whiskery cheek to the other, nodded, eyeing a chair. "Can I set down? That was kind of a long ride from Saugus."

"Help yourself," Yoshiba said. "You understand that this is serious? A case of murder?"

"I didn't figure you'd have every lawman in the state scourin' nickel and dime trailer camps to haul me back here just for pissin' in some alley. But you got the wrong man. I never killed nobody." He dropped his loose bulk onto a hard chair. "Who is it's dead?"

"Richard William Wendell," Yoshiba said. From a corner, a deputy district attorney in Levi's and a Little League cap asked, "Know the name?"

"Heard of it." Huncie jerked a nod.

"We've got a suspect locked up," Yoshiba said. "Lawrence Henry Johns. You know that name too, right? Right. The mother of the victim found Johns standing over the body cleaning off the gun the victim was shot with."

"Well, almighty Gawd," Huncie said moderately. "Ain't that enough?"

"It's a little too much," Dave said. He leaned on a file cabinet, nursing a paper cup of coffee and smoking. "The only fingerprints on the weapon belong to the mother. There are powder burns on the hand and chest of the deceased, whose gun it was. And fifteen hundred dollars is missing from his desk."

"Oh?" Huncie said. "Who are you?"

Dave told him. Wind that smelled of warm night ocean breathed in at the open window next to him. "No one else can account for that fifteen hundred. We have an idea you can."

"Me?" Huncie tried for a laugh but it broke and there was fear in his watery blue eyes. "How the hell did you scrounge up that idea, will you tell me?"

Yoshiba looked at the armed men. "Open that door, will you, and tell them to send in the witness?"

Jomay Johns was blond and scrubbed as a child. But her jeans and blouse were grubby. She didn't look more than twelve. Her hair was a baroque complex of yellow upsweeps and downfalls. "You son of a bitch," she said to Huncie. "You run off and left me without no clothes or nothin'. Me and BB. Plus, you stole that money. You dirty old bastard. You didn't just steal it. You stole it twice!"

Huncie eyed her and shifted the chaw again. "Where did you get to? I left you and BB gettin' malts and French fries at that there McDonald's and when I come back, you was no place to be seen."

"You're a liar," she said. "You drove off in the camper. When you didn't come for your food, I went out in the lot and looked. Wasn't no camper there. I had seventeen dollars change and didn't know nobody in town."

Huncie spread big hands. "I discovered I didn't have no more tobacco. I went lookin' for some. This here ain't chewin' tobacco country, sweetheart. I had one hell of a time. Then I come back and you're gone."

"Bullshit," she said. "Bullshit." She looked, outraged, from one to another of the shadowy figures in the office. "Do you believe this old bullshitter?"

"Take it easy," Yoshiba told her. "Larson, give her a chair, will you? Sit down, Mrs. Johns." While the Little League D.A. got up and fumbled in the crowded half dark, getting the chair out of the corner, Yoshiba said to Huncie, "This witness says you had in your possession at eleven o'clock Monday night a large bundle of twenty-dollar bills."

"I had 'em," Huncie said.

"Where did you get them?"

"They was owin' and I collected 'em," Huncie said.

"Owing," Yoshiba said, "to whom? For what?"

Back of him, propped against the window ledge, the public defender, Khazoyan, in a black mohair suit and a ruffled shirtfront, yawned noisily.

Huncie squinted at him past the glare of the desk lamp. "We can get this over with quick and let that man get home to bed," he said. "I got 'em off the desk in that little house next to the big house up there on Pinyon Trail in that canyon
—house belonging to, way I understood it, this here Wendell, the fella which her little runaway husband"—he nodded at dim Jomay—"the one you call Lawrence
Henry Johns, says he was going to get the money from he owed." "Just as simple as that," Yoshiba said.

Huncie nodded, rose, creaked in the new boots to the window. Khazoyan stepped aside. Huncie spat a long brown stream of tobacco juice into the night. Wiping his mouth with a hand, he turned back. "Just as simple as that. Not a dead body in it. Larry was to collect the money and I was to drive out to that barny-lookin' place on the beach and get it off him next mornin'. Hell, I saved him and me both trouble, that was all. You too, Jomay honey. If you'd only kept your pretty little ass on that there plastic stool in McDonald's."

"I don't think you're a trouble saver," Yoshiba said. "I think you're a trouble maker, and I bet I'm not the first person who's told you that. How did you find Wendell's? Did you follow him and Johns up there?"

"Nope." With a sigh, the big old man dropped onto his chair again. "First I figured to call in on him at his place of business, but time I got her and BB into a movie she was half willin' to see
—you think combin' and fixin' all that pretty yella hair don't take time, you ain't lived much with women—I got there too late. There was some sissy boy back of the bar and I asked him. Wendell had left. So—I looked up Wendell in the phone book and took me a little drive up there. Nice night for it."

"I thought you wanted us to get to bed," Khazoyan complained. "You want to cut to the good part?"

"All right," Huncie said agreeably. "I got up there and seen 'em through the window, standin' by the desk. Wendell took this envelope out of his jacket and tore it open and took out these bundles of bills and showed 'em to Larry. They left the room. I stepped in, picked the money up off the desk, stepped out again. There it is, all of it, the plain and simple truth. Not only wasn't there no murder in it; there wasn't no theft, neither. Ask her
—don't he owe you that money, Jomay?"

"Not anymore," she said. "You do."

"Hold on," Yoshiba said. "Johns says they heard you. Wendell came out, there was an argument and a struggle and a gun went off.
 
You didn't walk out of there with that money. Not till Wendell had pulled a gun on you and you'd wrestled with him and it had gone off and killed him. Then you left. But I'll bet it wasn't at a walk."

"It was," Huncie said. "And nobody come out of that other room. The door stayed shut." He tilted the straw hat back, tilted the chair back, ran a thick finger along the stubbly edge of his tobacco-working jaw. "But somebody did run."

"Somebody?" Khazoyan made a waking-up sound.

Huncie looked at him. "Sure. You didn't think I'd open up and tell you all this if I didn't think I had some chance of provin' it, do you? There was a witness. I seen him runnin' away, up the back there."

Yoshiba picked up a pen. "Description?"

"Aw, now, Lieutenant
—you know better'n that. It was pitch dark up there. Big pines all around."

"But you did say 'him,' " Yoshiba said. "You know it was a man." He glanced back and up at Dave.

Huncie said, "Well, no. Now that you mention it, guess I don't." Scowling to himself, he let the chair legs down with a clack, got up and went to the window again to spit. "Could have been a she-male. Did have a big handbag, the kind they wear on a strap over their shoulder. Seen it bangin' against her hip when she run off through the trees. Her, him."

"You didn't follow?" Dave asked.

"What for? I had what I come for, purely legal. But I can give you a lead." He paused, chewing, watching their faces. "When I got down to the camper, there was another car parked there. One of them fancy pickups, you know? Look more like a sports car than a truck?"

"El Camino," Yoshiba said.

"That's it. Was a truck, though. Little name lettered real modest on the door
—Thomas Owens, AIA. My Lord! Why, that's the name of that fella Larry was eatin' off of in that beach place, ain't it? Owens?"

"What does this mean?" Gail Ewing blocked the doorway. Far down the room at her back, light from a wicker-shaded swag lamp islanded the grouped furniture by the hooded fireplace and made black mirrors of the tall glass wall panels. She wore a housecoat and no makeup. Her eyelids were swollen, her speech thick. She pushed at rumpled hair. "Do you realize what time it is?"

On the deck, the dark dunes at their back, Yoshiba, Khazoyan, Larson and Dave watched sea wind play with the long yellow hair of Jomay Johns, who had pressed the bell push. Yoshiba held his wallet above the girl's head, let it fall open. "Police," he said. "Like to come in and talk to you a few minutes."

"No, not tonight." Gail Ewing backed, started to shut the door. "There's an invalid in the house. Everyone else is asleep. I've taken a sleeping pill myself, and I simply wouldn't be
—"

"Sorry, Mrs. Ewing, but it can't wait." Yoshiba put square, thick hands on the Johns girl's little shoulders and pushed her ahead of him into the room. Gail Ewing was forced to back up. Yoshiba moved in. Larson and Khazoyan followed. And Dave. Gail Ewing narrowed the yellow eyes at him. "You!" she said. "You're responsible for this."

"You know better than that," Dave said. "If anyone's responsible, it's you. If you'd gone to your brother with Larry's problem, he'd have given the boy the money he needed, or gotten him a lawyer, done what was necessary. None of the rest of it would have happened."

"I refuse to believe that." Her chin thrust out stubbornly. She turned to the squat policeman. "Lieutenant Yoshiba, I've told you my brother's an invalid. He's not to be disturbed."

"I don't think we'll have to disturb him." Yoshiba shut the door quietly, firmly. "You can probably answer our questions."

"I don't have to." She clutched the robe at her throat. "I'm entitled to an attorney." Yoshiba's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "You're not charged with anything."

Larson stepped forward, taking off his Little League cap. He was going bald under it. "I'm George Larson, Mrs. Ewing
—deputy district attorney. This is Art Khazoyan. He's an attorney also—public defender's office. We'll see that your rights are protected in every
way."

Her mouth twitched but she didn't answer him. She turned her anger on the little blond girl. "What are you doing back here? Haven't you caused enough trouble?"

"Mother! Are you out of your mind?" Trudy's voice came from the shadowy top of the wooden bird-flight stairs. She was a slim silhouette, something bulky in her arms. Down the high gallery behind her, light made a yellow rectangle of a doorway. "She's come back for her baby."

"Oh, God." Gail Ewing shut her eyes, rubbed her forehead.

"For Christ sake!" Mark Dimond was a jerky shadow in the lighted doorway, kicking into pants. He came fast along the gallery, buttoning his fly, to stand beside Trudy. "Tom wants her to stay here, anyhow. You know that."

"It's the damn sleeping pill!" Gail Ewing shouted at him. "I loathe the things. I wouldn't have taken one if it weren't for all this
—" She finished the sentence with a frantic nipping of her hands. She said to Jomay, "Go along, child—I'm sorry."

Jomay glared sourly at her and went for the stairs. Trudy called down to her. "It's all right. She slept all the time you were gone."

Jomay climbed the stairs.

Yoshiba told Gail Ewing, "What we need to know is about Mr. Owens's car
—the El Camino, the one parked up in the port now. Who
drove it Monday night? He didn't."

"With two broken legs?" Her tone scathed him. "Your powers of deduction are amazing, Lieutenant."

"Sarcasm is wasted on Orientals, Mrs. Ewing," Yoshiba said. "We're extremely impassive. Slights and abuse run off our backs like water off a duck
—a mandarin duck, of course."

"Forgive me," she said stiffly. "I don't know anything about the
car. I was at a City Council meeting that night. I drove my own car."

"I thought Trudy smashed up your car," Dave said.

"I have a replacement," Gail Ewing said. "Thanks to Sequoia Accident and Indemnity Corporation, Mr. Brandstetter." She smiled coldly. "Insurance, remember?"

Larson said, "On halting offshore oil drilling."

"What?" Yoshiba looked at him.

"That was what the City Council session was about," Larson said. "I was there myself. I saw Mrs. Ewing."

She studied him, nodded. "Yes. That's right."

"So who had the car?" Yoshiba asked again.

"No one," she said.

"Mark Dimond," Dave said. He looked up the stairs. The boy wasn't standing beside the girls and the baby anymore. Dave started to turn for the door. Yoshiba stopped him. "Don't sweat it. They're out there." He meant two uniformed officers who had followed them up the dark coast road in a patrol car.

"Who's out there?" Gail Ewing asked sharply and tried to push past them to the door.