Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery

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J Fog shrouded the canyon, a box canyon above a California ranch town called Pima. It rained. Not hard but steady and gray and dismal. Shaggy pines loomed through the mist like threats. Sycamores made white, twisted gestures above the arroyo . Down the arroyo water pounded, ugly, angry and deep. The road shouldered the arroyo. It was a bad road. The rains had chewed its edges. There were holes. Mud and rock half buried it in places. It was steep and winding and there were no guard rails. He drove it with sweating hands. Why? His smile was sour. Why so careful? Wasn't death all he'd wanted for the past six weeks? His mouth tightened. That was finished. He'd made up his mind to live now. Hadn't he? Live and forgetat least until he could remember without pain. And that would happen someday. Sure it would. All the books said so. The sum of human wisdom. Meantime, he was working again. 1 And here was the bridge. It was wooden, maybe thirty feet in span, ten feet wide. Heavy beams, thick planks, big iron bolts. Simple and strong. The right kind of bridge for this place. He stopped the car and got out. Cold. He shivered and hunched his shoulders. The rain laid a quick, eager surface on the road. It splashed over his shoes. His feet were wet when he walked out on the bridge. Its railings on the downstream side had been replaced. The new two-by-fours looked pale. They still bled sap. A car had smashed out the old ones. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat and stood staring down. There was a lot of raw power to that water. It was muddy and seething, so he couldn't see the boulders tumbling, but he could hear them, feel them. The bridge vibrated. That water could tumble a car as easily. It had. Five days ago. Three days later, when there was a letup in the storm and the water level fell, police had found the car. A mile downstream . Battered, flattened, glass smashed out, doors half tom off. They hadn't found the driver. That was why Dave Brandstetter was here. He walked to the far side of the bridge, where the road angled off and climbed steeply. It was a hell of an unsafe arrangement. But the whole road was unsafe, no more than a poorly paved deer track. Still, no one used it but the few people who lived in the canyon. Knowing it, they didn't fear it. Which could have been a mistake. At least for one of them. On a night of rain and darkness, Fox Olson 's white Thunderbird might have hit the top of that slope too fast. It had certainly hit the bottom too fast. Dave slogged back to his car. He found the house a mile beyond the bridge. It stood 2 back and up from the road under towering, ragged-barked eucalyptus trees. The dark ivy that covered the slope in front was glossed by rain. So were the two cars in the drive -new red Mustang, battered old Chevy. He left his own car under a manzanita by the road. The house was onestory , rambling, sided with cedar shakes that hadn't been painted and hadn't had time yet really to weather. The place looked comfortable and expensive. He pressed the button beside the front door. The woman who opened it was small, not much above five feet. Thin, fine-boned, in her early forties, like himself. Her hair was brown with some gray in it. She had cropped it like a boy's, smart and simple. Her hips were narrow as a boy's and looked right in the brown corduroy Levi's. She wore a brown checked wool shirt. No jewelry, no makeup except lipstick. She couldn't have looked more feminine. "Mrs. Olson?" he said. "I'm Dave Brandstetter." "And soaking wet," she apologized. "I'm sorry about that. Come in." With a glance at the weather and a shiver, she shut the door. "Give me those and I'll hang them in the kitchen to drip. You go make yourself comfortable." She took the trench coat and canvas hat away. He stepped down into the living room. It was long. Pitched roof, hand-hewn beams, knotty-pine paneling...