“My time? I’d only waste it sleeping. And I’m out of practice. I wouldn’t do it well.” Barker glanced sourly at the folders, forms, photographs on his desk, then hung another cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward so Dave could light it. “Lily is a trick Robinson picked up at the Billy Budd. You know the place?”
Dave nodded. “Ocean Front Walk.”
“Robinson tended bar there. The kid’s a hustler but way out of Robinson’s league. A hundred bucks a night and/or a part in your next TV segment, sir. But somehow Robinson managed to keep him. Eight, ten weeks, anyway—” The phone on Barker’s desk jangled. He lifted the receiver, listened, grunted, cradled the receiver. “—till he was dead. Lily ran, but not far and not clever. He was better at crying. You know the type. Muscles, but a real girl. Kept sobbing that he loved Robinson and why would he kill him?”
“And why would he?” Dave lit a cigarette.
Barker shrugged. “Probably hysteria. Toward the end they were fighting a lot. About money. Robinson had bought him fancy clothes, an Omega watch, a custom surfboard. They’d been pricing Porsches and Aston-Martins on the lots. But Robinson was broke. He’d hocked his stereo, camera, projector. He was borrowing from friends.”
“What friends?” Dave asked. “Shevel?”
“Among others,” Barker said. “Which kind of louses up your theory, doesn’t it? Shevel didn’t need to shoot anybody for their insurance money. He’s loaded.”
The boy who opened the door had dressed fast. He still hadn’t buttoned his white coverall with L.A. Marina stitched on the pocket. Under the coverall his jockeys were on inside out and backward. Below the nick of navel in his flat brown belly a label read Pilgrim. He was Chicano and wore his hair long. He looked confused. “He thought it would be the layouts.”
“It isn’t,” Dave said. “Brandstetter is my name. Death claims investigator, Medallion Life. I’m looking for Bruce K. Shevel. Is he here?”
“Brand—what?” the boy said.
At his back a dense jungle of philodendrons climbed a trellis to the ceiling. From beyond it a voice said, “Wait a minute, Manuel.” A pair of chrome-spoked wheels glittered into view, a pair of wasted legs under a lap robe, a pair of no color eyes that had never forgiven anyone anything. “I remember you. What do you want?”
“Arthur Thomas Robinson is dead,” Dave said.
“I’ve already told the police what I know.”
“Not all of it.” Wind blew cold rain across the back of Dave’s neck. He turned up the trench coat collar. “You left out the part that interests me—that you’re the beneficiary of his life insurance.”
Shevel stared. There was no way for his face to grow any paler. It was parchment. But his jaw dropped. When he shut it, his dentures clicked. “You must be joking. There’s got to be some mistake.”
“There’s not.” Dave glanced at the rain. “Can I come in and talk about it?”
Shevel’s mouth twitched. “Did you bring the check?”
Dave shook his head. “Murder has a way of slowing down the routine.”
“Then there’s nothing to talk about.” The wheelchair was motorized. It started to turn away.
“Why would he name you?” Dave asked.
Shrug. “We were old friends.”
Dave studied the Chicano boy who was watching them with something frantic in his eyes. “Friends?”
“Oh, come in, come in,” Shevel snarled, and wheeled out of sight. Dave stepped onto deep beige carpeting and the door closed behind him. But when he turned to hand the trench coat over, there was no one to take it. Manuel had buttoned up and left. Dave laid the coat over his arm and went around the leafy screen. A long, handsome room stretched to sliding glass doors at its far end that looked down on a marina where little white boats waited row on row like children’s coffins in the rain. Shevel rattled ice and glasses at a low bar. “I met Robbie in the hospital,” he said, “ten years ago.” He came wheeling at Dave, holding out a squat studded glass in which dark whiskey islanded an ice cube. “Just as I met you.” His smile was crooked. “He worked there. An orderly.”
“And you brought him along to look after you when the hospital let you go.” Dave took the drink. “Thanks.”
“Robbie had good hands.” Shevel aimed the chair at the planter. From under it somewhere he took a small green plastic watering can. He tilted it carefully into the mulch under the climbing vines. “And patience.”
“Who took his place?”
“No one. No one could. This apartment is arranged so that I don’t need day-to-day help.” Shevel set the watering can back. “The market sends in food and liquor.” He drank from his glass. “I can cook my own meals. I’m able to bathe myself and so on. A cleaning woman comes in twice a week. I have a masseur on call.”
“Manuel?” Dave wondered.
“Not Manuel,” Shevel said shortly and drank again.
“You publish a lot of magazines,” Dave said. “How do you get to your office? Specially equipped car?”
“No car,” Shevel said. “Cars are the enemy.” He purred past Dave and touched a wall switch. A panel slid back. Beyond gleamed white wet-look furniture, a highgloss white desk stacked with papers, a white electric typewriter, a photocopy machine. Blow up color photos of naked girls muraled the walls. “I don’t go to the office. My work comes to me. And there’s the telephone.” He swallowed more whiskey. “You remember the telephone?” He touched the switch and the panel slid closed.
“Dave asked, “When did Robinson quit you?”
“Eight months, two weeks, and six days ago,” Shevel said. He said it grimly with a kind of inverse satisfaction, like counting notches in a gun butt.
“Did he give a reason?”
“Reason?” Shevel snorted and worked on his drink again. “He felt old age creeping up on him. He was all of thirty-two. He decided he wanted to be the one who was looked after, for a change.”
“No quarrels? No hard feelings?”
“Just boredom.” Shevel looked at his glass but it was empty. Except for the ice cube. It still looked new. He wheeled abruptly back to the bar and worked the bottle again. Watching him, Dave tried his drink for the first time. Shevel bought good Bourbon with Medallion’s money. Shevel asked, “If there’d been hard feelings, would he have come back to borrow money?”
“That might depend on how much he needed it,” Dave said.
“Or thought he did. I hear he was desperate.”
Shevel’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“Trying to keep a champagne boy on a beer income.”
“Exactly.” Shevel’s mouth tightened like a drawstring purse. “He never had any common sense.”
“So you didn’t lend him anything,” Dave said.
“I told him not to be a fool. Forty-nine percent of the world’s population is male.” Shevel’s chair buzzed. He steered it back, stopped it, tilted his glass, swallowed half the new drink. He looked toward the windows where the rain was gray. His voice was suddenly bleak. “I’m sorry he’s dead. He was life to me for a long time.”
“I’ll go.” Dave walked to the bar, set down his glass, began shrugging into the trench coat. “Just two more questions. Manuel. Does he take you deer hunting?”
Shevel looked blank.
Dave said, “Your thirty-thirty. When did you use it last?”
Shevel squinted. “What are you talking about?”
“A deer rifle. Winchester. Remington.”
“Sorry.” His bony fingers teased his white wig. He simpered like a skid row barroom floozy. “I’ve always preferred indoor sports.” He was suddenly drunk. He looked Dave up and down hungrily. “Next question.”