Gravedigger Read Online Free Page B

“You’re sick,” he said. “Should you even be here?”
    Salazar sat down, making a face of disgust. “Fucking flu,” he said. “Had it since Christmas. Makes you weak. I’m all right.” He wiped the film of sweat off his face with tissues from a torn, flower-patterned box almost empty. He nodded at the directory. “You going to call somebody?”
    Dave flopped open the book. In the big outer room, the fat brown boy stopped cursing in Spanish and began snarling like an animal. Metal furniture crashed again. Dave turned to look. A file cabinet lay on its side, spewing paper. Six men loaded the brown boy out of the room like a captive beast. Dave blinked at Salazar.
    “PCP,” Salazar said. “It takes them that way.”
    Dave located the name Dekker and found a Dekker paired with Sandpiper Lane in a gray column on a gray page. He punched for an outside line. He punched the Dekker number. Scotty had not gone to school. He told Dave what Dave asked to know, Dave thanked him, hung up, and passed the phone to Salazar. “It’s a Rolls, late sixties, a four-door hardtop, two-tone, brown and gold. Westover is five ten, hazel eyes, brown hair beginning to thin on top at the back, no extra weight on him, maybe one-forty. Lately, he didn’t always remember to shave.”
    Salazar held the receiver to his ear. He punched the phone buttons with the rubber end of a yellow pencil. He asked Dave, “Marks or scars?”
    “The tip of one ear is missing. The informant doesn’t remember which ear. He’s just a neighbor kid.”
    Salazar relayed Westover’s description to someone in an office who had to do with keeping track of unidentified corpses. None of the unidentified corpses on hand fitted the description. Salazar tried another number and told someone about the Rolls. He waited a long time, receiver trapped at his ear by his shoulder, drank coffee, finished his cigarette, snubbed out the cigarette in a square glass ashtray heaped with short, yellow-stained butts. He said “Yes” into the receiver, listened some more, grunted “Thanks” and replaced the receiver. “No abandoned or smashed-up Rollses, either,” he said.
    “Because it isn’t in the garage,” Dave said, “doesn’t have to mean Westover drove it away. A car like that? Why didn’t somebody steal it? The garage is padlocked, but that doesn’t signify. He could be in the house tied up and gagged. He could be in there murdered. It’s an expensive house in an expensive neighborhood. Why didn’t somebody break in, kill him, plunder the place, and steal the car?”
    “Because that’s not the obvious explanation,” Salazar said. “The obvious explanation is that the man has huge debts he can’t pay. He was grabbing at straws, trying to defraud your insurance company. When it didn’t pay off right away, he packed up and cleared out.”
    “His son disappeared at the same time,” Dave said. “Eighteen, nineteen. Name of Lyle. Music student.”
    “What are you saying now?” Salazar asked. “That the son killed him and drove off with the family car?”
    “Off the record,” Dave said, “no. But if I said yes for the record, would you send a team out there?”
    “Look at this mess.” Salazar picked up and dropped the loose stack of files, papers, photographs, on his desk. One of the photographs slid to the floor on Dave’s side. He bent and picked it up. A middle-aged black in a Hawaiian shirt lay in a leakage of blood by a back-alley trash module. Dave laid the photo on the desk. The black’s bulging eyes stared at him. He looked as if the last thing he could imagine was being dead. Salazar said, “We had one thousand five hundred and thirty-two homicides in this county in the last eight months.” He tried to straighten the papers. “You haven’t even got a crime. Why won’t Westover be back tomorrow? Why won’t the kid? Have you got another cigarette?”
    Dave gave him another cigarette.
    Romano’s was crowded for lunch. It was dark