Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery

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118 He went to bed stoned. But not stoned enough. He had bad dreams. A giant wasp was trapped in the kitchen. It buzzed, buzzed, hurled itself against the fragile shutter doors. He leaned on them, held them, sweating, horrified. A barbed javelin-size stinger thrust between the slats. He opened his mouth to scream for help but no sound came. Then he was awake and knowing what he heard-the buzz of the doorbell. Insistent . Under a stubborn thumb. He staggered to the closet for the blue corduroy bathrobe and remembered it was still in a grip in the luggage compartment of the car. He dragged the top blanket off the bed, wrapped it around him, and stumbled to the front door and yanked it open. Maybe it was morning but it still rained and it was still dark. A big man in a cowboy hat stood there dripping. Dave didn't know him. But he knew the little man shivering beside him. Kohlmeyer . Black eye sockets, white skull face. The big man moved indoors. He didn't push, didn't touch Dave, didn't need to. Nobody could have stopped him. Dave backed. Kohlmeyer faltered in after the big man and Dave shut the door and switched on a lamp. "You'd be Lloyd Chalmers," he said. Chalmers's voice came down like a load of gravel out of one of his big red trucks. "Kohlmeyer tells me he told you a story about me. I want you to know it was a lie." "But you do know Kohlmeyer," Dave said. "And there'll be a record of the check you gave him. At your bank or somewhere." The thermostat control was on the wall next to the bedroom door. Dave started for it. Chalmers's hand was massive on his arm, hard as concrete. "Where you going?" "It's cold in here. I was going to turn on the heat." "You can go back to bed in a minute," Chalmers grunted. "What I've got to say won't take long." "But you drove two hundred fifty miles on a rainy night to say it." "I never said it wasn't important." "You deny you bought photographs from Kohlmeyer? Dirty photographs of your political rival?" "Rival, shit!" Chalmers scoffed. "He was winning," Dave said. "Everybody in Pima told me so. Persuading an opponent to quit a race because of an episode in his past is not an unknown tactic among politicians , Mr. Chalmers." "I'm not a politician," Chalmers said. "I'm a builder. A businessman. And a good one. The town's kept me in office because they knew I could run things and run things ~ight. Lived in Pima all my life. People know me and trust me. 119 Olson was a jump-up stranger. A clown. They might kid about electing him, but when they got in the polling booth they'd have plunked down their X by Chalmers. Naw. If this idea of yours wasn't so nasty it'd be laughable." Dave looked at Kohlmeyer. The wrecked little man wore lavender silk pajamas under his topcoat. On his feet, which were blue-veined, thin, and white almost to transparency, were gold-embroidered scarlet Turkish slippers. Soaked. Chalmers had obviously dragged him here straight from bed. Now he racked up a smile. It tried for impudence but the effect was grisly and pathetic. So was the simpering toss of the head. You expected to hear bones rattle. "The check was for a painting. By a student." "My wife collects this modernistic junk," Chalmers growled. "But my story," Kohlmeyer said, "was considerably more amusing, don't you agree?" He winked. It couldn't have been more startling if it had happened in a waxworks. "I fear I have something of an impish quality I've never been quite able to suppress. These fancies spring to mind and"the narrow shoulders rose, the hands came up and unfolded like diseased petals-"I just blurt them out. I mean, life's so relentlessly drab. My little fictions aren't meant to harmthey 're meant to vivify, is all. I've been called malicious." It hurt him to speak the word. He widened his eyes and blinked. The shutter mechanism was rusty. "I'm not. Truly I'm not. I'm a very loving person. Anything I've ever said that's hurt anyone, I...