Nightwork (5 page)

“It was good of you to call the Sheriff for me.”

“I couldn’t let anything happen to a car like that. My friend Ramon and I favored Jaguars in our time.” Gifford’s eyes were small and sunken but bright. “Ramon Novarro, you know? Will it shock you if I tell you we were lovers?” He looked Dave up and down. “That’s Brooks Brothers, isn’t it?” He stated it as fact. It was a fact. He nodded. “Yes. It suits you. You have a beautiful figure. When I saw you stop on Lemon Street, I thought you were younger. There’s something young about your carriage, isn’t there?” He turned the chair abruptly and wheeled away up the drive again. “What did you want at the Myers house? A lot of strangers have been stopping there lately.”

“Paul Myers died suddenly.” Dave walked alongside the wheelchair. “That usually brings strangers. I’m from the company that insured his life. Do you know the names of everyone in Gifford Gardens?”

“Paul Myers was witness two years ago to a supermarket holdup.” Gifford rolled the chair up the long, easy grade of a wooden ramp to the spindlework verandah. Dave climbed the stairs. He wondered about those big dogs barking inside the house. Gifford said, “He was on the television news. That brought him to my attention.” The house doors were a pair, each with two tall, narrow panes of glass etched with Pre-Raphaelite lotuses. Gifford pushed open the doors. The dogs did not come bounding out. The dogs stopped barking.

Gifford rolled his chair into a hallway spacious and two stories high, where a broad, carved staircase climbed, to divide left and right at a landing beneath a stained-glass window. Dogs clawed, snuffled, growled behind closed sliding doors. Dave followed the old man in the floppy grape hat into a passageway beside the stairs. He glimpsed a large, dim room with furniture under shrouds. Gifford told him, “I used to entertain a good deal. Especially when Mother was away in Europe. She didn’t take to my friends.” He bumped open a swinging door to a pantry passage. “Now that she’s dead and out of the way, so are they.” He gave a brief hoot of irony. “Oh, my dear. What a joke life is.”

He poked a black button in a brass wall plate. A metal door whose white enamel bore long horizontal scratches slid open. “This was once a dumbwaiter. The kitchen is below. I adored riding up and down in it as a little girl.” He slid aside a folding metal grille. “When I lost the use of my legs, I had it converted.” He gestured with the impatience of an old man irritated by his incapacities. “Get in, get in.” Dave stepped into the cramped metal box, and Gifford backed his chair into it and rattled the grille shut. He poked a button, the steel door closed, the elevator jerked, thumped, began to rise. Slowly. Shivering. “That’s a handsome young man staying at the Myers house,” Gifford said. “I saw you talking to him. Who is he?”

“Mrs. Myers’s kid brother,” Dave said.

“I love it when they go around without their shirts.”

“He’s there to protect her,” Dave said. “Somebody gave her a beating. She says it was her husband. I don’t think so. A day or two before he was killed, did you see anyone stop there, any strangers? When Myers wasn’t at home?”

“He was rarely at home.” The elevator jerked to a halt and Gifford tugged back the folding grille. He pressed the button that worked the steel door. It slid back, and he rolled out of the elevator. “He was always off somewhere in that enormous truck of his. Often gone for days.”

They had reached the attic, wide and high and gloomy. Also hot, though an air conditioner rattled someplace out of sight. With its quiet whine, the wheelchair took Gifford along a crooked aisle between heaps of packing cases, barrels, trunks thick with dust and cobwebs. Dave followed, dodging the corner of an old yellow life raft.

“Mind your head,” Gifford said. “I should get rid of that. A young man who lived with me for a time after the war had survived on one of those for days after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific. Once, driving to the beach, he caught sight of that propped outside a surplus store. He got all nostalgic and simply had to have it. I bought it for him. Along with the compressed-air containers to inflate it. Absurd. Still, it made him sleep easier.” Gifford sniffed. “Naturally, he left it behind when he decamped.”

He rounded a chimney of rosy old brick and crusty mortar, and was in a cleared space that held a four-poster bed with a handsome patchwork spread, a chest of drawers with a cankered mirror, and a television set. On the wall was a blown-up photograph of Ramon Novarro, stripped to the waist and oiled. Off this space opened the tower room—couch, coffee table, wing chair. A pair of large, expensive binoculars stood on a windowsill. Gifford said, “A wife can grow weary of being left alone so much.” He leaned the rifle against the chest, tossed the picture hat onto the bed. “No wonder she took a lover.”

Dave stared. “Are you talking about Angela Myers?”

“Who else?” Gifford smoothed his uncut hair. He nodded. “Behind that partition”—he meant the one at the head of the bed—“you’ll find a kitchen. I do all my living up here now. It’s simpler. And cheaper. And the attic was always the most amusing part of the house. I spent much of my wretched childhood up here—the unwretched part. Old books, old magazines, old steamer trunks full of gowns and hats.”

“You’re sure about the lover?” Dave said. “Who is he?”

“I was trying to say”—Gifford struggled to get out of the frayed cardigan—“that it is hot up here, and a gin and tonic would be welcome, and would you fix it, please?”

“My pleasure.” Dave found the kitchen in a sunny gable, everything neat and compact, stove, refrigerator, steel sink, cupboards, floor mopped and waxed. He found glasses. Gin, ice, and quinine water were in the refrigerator. He built the drinks while Gifford talked on.

“Wonderful, awful old books. I read them all, no matter how boring. There were tons of yellowback French novels, terribly naughty by
fin de siècle
standards. With a dictionary, I used them to teach myself French. And when reading palled, and dressing up, there were always these windows to watch out of. We were isolated out here in those days, but hikers came, and sometimes lovers. I saw some charming pastoral tableaux down among the oaks by the creek on warm summer days. At nights, I crept down for a closer look. That was how I learned anatomy and physiology. I was keen on self-education, you see. Naturally, I saw some things I ought never to have seen, and that haunt me still. But that is what little boys who prowl and spy upon others can expect, isn’t it?”

“I couldn’t locate any mint.” Dave found Gifford in the tower room, seated in the wing chair, peering through the binoculars, frail fingers adjusting the focus. When he heard Dave, he set the glasses on the windowsill, sat back, smiled, held out his shaky hand to take the glass. “There is no mint, alas. In the kitchen garden, there used always to be mint. But that was long ago.” He rattled the ice in his drink and sipped at it, dribbling bubbles into his beard. “Ah, delicious.” He waved at a couch, Empire style, covered by a fringed Spanish shawl almost as threadbare as the upholstery it was meant to hide. “Sit down.”

Dave continued to stand. “You know the man’s name?”

“I make it a point to learn the names of people who interest me from afar. Bruce Kilgore. He operates a school down there, under the rubber tree.” Gifford gestured vaguely. “I believe the generic term for them is white-flight schools.”

“Right. How do you know they’re lovers? There are no more oaks for them to make love under down by the creek.” Dave walked to the windows. They were shiny clean, inside and out. How did Gifford manage that? The view was amazing for distance and breadth. “Can you see her bedroom windows from here? Does she forget to lower the blinds?”

“You ask a good many questions for an insurance salesman,” Gifford said, and his sunken eyes, bright and curious as a six-year-old’s, fixed Dave from under brushy white brows. “That isn’t what you are, really, is it?”

“I’m a death-claims investigator,” Dave said. “When it looked as if Myers had an accident, the insurance company wasn’t unduly worried. When it emerged that somebody blew his truck up with a bomb, they hired me.”

“You didn’t come here to thank me,” Gifford said. “You came to pump me.”

Dave gave him a thin smile. “One of the deputies who came in response to your telephone call about my car said you see everything that goes on in Gifford Gardens. You’re obviously civic-minded. I assumed you’d want to help me.”

Gifford studied him for what seemed a long time. He cleared his throat. “She didn’t forget to pull the blinds. But he came only late at night, when the husband was away”—Gifford drank thirstily again—“and the children were almost certain to be asleep. What would you make of that?”

“And the night Myers was killed?”

A ledger lay on the coffee table, with stacks of magazines and books, a potted fern in supermarket green foil, an ashtray with a cigarette butt in it. Dave saw no cigarette pack on the table, nor on the stand by the bed, which held a lamp, a clock radio, a telephone, and another photograph of Ramon Novarro, this one in a tarnished silver frame. The ink of an inscription had faded. Gifford stretched a hand out for the ledger, laid it on his blanketed knees, turned pages covered with closely written ballpoint script. “Ah-ha. Here we are. Night of the ninth.” Gifford smoothed the page. He sat straight. His eyesight must have been childlike too, un-blurred. “On that night, she was away. With the children. All night. Kilgore did not appear. Mrs. Myers reached home with the children about seven-forty-five. Sheriff’s officers were waiting to give her the bad news.” He closed the ledger and gave Dave a smug little nod. “I keep written records. The memory plays so many tricks.”

“Thank you.” Dave frowned. “You used the word ‘came’ about Kilgore. Is it over? Doesn’t he come anymore?”

“Not since Myers died.” Gifford shrugged. “After all, the beautiful brother is in the way, isn’t he? But no, it is not over.”

“They meet at Kilgore’s, while the brother babysits?”

“Kilgore has living quarters at the school,” Gifford said. “Yes, as you say. Twice, anyway. Perhaps more.” He twitched a smile inside the frowsty beard. “After all, I am not King Argus of the Hundred Eyes, who never slept.” His two creepy, clear child’s eyes twinkled at Dave. “It will amuse you to learn that Mrs. Myers went straight to see Kilgore after she left the house this morning in her waitress’s uniform, while you remained behind with the beautiful brother. What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t say. For what it’s worth, it’s Eugene Molloy.” Dave nodded at the ledger. “No one came and beat Mrs. Myers up on the night of the ninth. When did they come? Who were they? Or were you sleeping?”

“It was two nights before.” Gifford’s hand strayed across the rough gray fabric of the ledger cover, as if to open the book again, but he didn’t open it. He said, “I have my own reasons for remembering that night. It was well after dark. A stocky, middle-aged woman came, and two muscular men. She was startlingly well dressed. They, I think, were truck drivers. They arrived in a van without markings. I can’t see license numbers at night. They didn’t stay long. Five or ten minutes. When they came out, one of the men was rubbing his knuckles. The next day, when I got a glimpse of Mrs. Myers taking in some dry clothes from the backyard, her face was a mass of bruises, and she moved as if in pain.”

“Never seen the stocky woman and her goons before?”

Gifford shook his head. “It wasn’t her husband who beat her. Why do you suppose she told you that? He didn’t come home that night, or all the next day until dusk. I gather he was moonlighting.” Gifford laid the ledger back on the table. “Who was that handsome chap who arrived this morning while you were there? Spanish, right? What we might call ‘a living doll,’ might we not? What did he want?”

Dave told the old man who Jaime Salazar was. “He came to say they have a suspect in the murder of Paul Myers. A recent parolee named Silencio Ruiz.” Gifford gasped and stiffened in his chair. Dave said, “Are you all right?”

“I live my life in pain,” Gifford snapped. “So will you, when you’re seventy-five.” His voice was a wheeze, he gulped feebly and pointed. “If you don’t mind? The bathroom? Digitalis.”

A small bathroom backed the small kitchen. A dozen little amber plastic cylinders held pills in a medicine cabinet that also contained a pressure can of shaving cream and a pack of throwaway razors. Dave put on reading glasses and found the digitalis. He tapped a pill into his palm. A glass stood on the washbasin beside a box of denture cleaner. He filled the glass. In the tower room, trembling, the old man popped the pill into his mouth and gulped the water. He sat with eyes shut, panting. He whispered:

“Thank you. I won’t keep you. The keys to the gates are in my sweater.” He fluttered a weak hand toward the bed. “When you’ve locked up, throw the keys as far up the drive as you can. I’ll retrieve them later.”

“Shouldn’t I call your doctor and wait till he comes?”

“It’s nothing. Happens all the time. It will pass. You’re very kind.” Gifford opened his eyes. They were cold. So was his voice. “Be careful on your way out of the house. My dogs are trained to kill.” The coldness left. His smile was saintly. “Thank you for coming to see a boring old cripple. I hope I’ve been of some help.”

“I appreciate it.” Dave dug the keys from the ragged sweater, and found his way out. Carefully.

C
HUNKY, HAIRY, TANNED, BRUCE
Kilgore pedaled an Exercycle in one of three rooms at the back of the lot occupied by the Kilgore School. His black, sweaty hair was thinning, he wore blue jogging shorts and running shoes. Sitting straight, look-ma-no-hands style, he spooned yoghurt from a yellow paper cup. Outside an open sliding glass door, the children Dave had seen earlier, waiting by the front gate, kicked a black and white soccer ball around. Their voices were shrill. From the size of the exercise ground, Dave guessed that once there had been a swimming pool in its place. Had the buildings originally housed a motel? The rooms were uniform motel-unit size. The others he had peered into held school desks. This one had a big desk, file cabinets, telephones, bookcases, typewriter, home-size computer, framed certificates on the wall. Except for the Exercycle, it was unmistakably a school office. It was also unmistakably a motel room.