Dave Brandstetter 05 Skinflick by Joseph Hansen

Author:Joseph Hansen [Hansen, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, gay
ISBN: 9781480416819
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-03-14T17:22:00+00:00

15

PIñATAS HUNG FROM THE old black rafters of a lean-to roof above Salazar’s beautiful head. They seemed to float there like animals in a Chagall painting—papier-mâché goats, burros, chickens, furred and feathered in shredded tissue paper, colors bright and clashing, red, orange, green, blue, bubble-gum pink. With flat tissue-paper eyes, they watched Indianans in Bermuda shorts and sundresses inch their way along the narrow bricked lanes between the huarache booths, sombrero booths, serape booths, the cactus-candy and woven-basket booths of Olvera Street. Mariachi music twanged and tin-trumpeted from loudspeakers. The hot air was thick with chili smells from greasy taco stands. A quartet of rouged children with paper roses in their hair and spangles on ruffled skirts danced to the music.

Behind Salazar, strings of shiny painted gourds framed a dark restaurant doorway. He sat across from Dave at a gingham-covered table and ate enchiladas, as Dave did, washing them down, as Dave did, with orange soda from thick, lukewarm bottles. “I can’t arrest him. How can I arrest him?” He wiped his chin with a paper napkin. He looked like a silent-movie idol—Gilbert Roland? “Ken Barker says he was murdered on his own street in LA. Ken Barker says this porno-shop owner killed him. Now I’m supposed to come barging in and say he was killed in some apartment on the Strip. His own kid killed him?”

“His own kid admits he was there,” Dave said. “Cowan saw him there.”

“Cowan didn’t see any murder,” Salazar said.

“But nobody saw Gerald Dawson alive after that. The Medical Examiner says he was killed between ten and midnight. And Bucky lied to Barker.”

Salazar shook his head and moodily poked at his refritos with his fork. “It doesn’t make a murder case,” he said. “All it makes is a family fight.”

“Come on, now,” Dave said. “You don’t believe that. What’s the matter? Is it the car you’re worried about? Why didn’t the wife, the widow, think of it afterward, get into her own car with Bucky, drive back there, so Bucky could drive Dawson’s car home while she followed in her own car?”

“People get hysterical, they forget details.” Glumly Salazar drank orange soda. “Even details as big as a car.”

“Alone, maybe,” Dave said. “A kid, especially. But he wasn’t alone. His mother helped. So did the preacher. They even remembered a detail as small as the keys.”

Salazar’s mouth was full of pink rice. He looked his question with big, smoldering brown eyes.

“If Dawson had driven himself home and was in the process of opening the garage, the keys would have been in his hand. They weren’t. Or in his pocket. Or on the street. They weren’t anywhere. Lon Tooker didn’t have them. I suggest you search Bucky’s room.”

“You’re kidding.” Salazar paused with a forkful of enchilada halfway to his mouth. “Why hide the stupid keys?”

“Because two of them fitted the Strip apartment—the street door, the door to unit thirty-six.”

“Why not get rid of them and leave the car keys?” Salazar put the forkful of food into his mouth.

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