Читать онлайн «Skinflick»

HE PARKED IN SUNGLARE on a steep narrow street whose cracked white cement was seamed with tar. The tar glistened and looked runny. He sat a minute longer in the icy draft from the dashboard vents. They’d been blowing since he got into the car twenty minutes ago, but the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat. And it was only ten in the morning. Los Angeles didn’t get like this often. He hated it when it did. And this time it was holding on. It had been brutal at the cemetery three weeks ago. His father’s nine widows had looked ready to drop. The savage light had leached the color from the flowers. The savage heat had got at the mound of earth from the grave even under its staring green blanket of fake grass. He’d stayed to watch the workmen fill the grave. The earth was dry. Even the sharp walls of the grave were dry. What the hell was he doing remembering that? He switched off the engine, grabbed his jacket, got out of the car.

The door fell shut behind him. In the oven air, he flapped into the jacket. He crossed the street. The house stared at him blind and sunstruck over oleanders. The curtains were drawn. The garage doors were down. The lots were hard to build on here. House front and garage front were only a step back from the street. On the short uptilt of driveway in front of the garage doors the tape the police had put down to mark where a dead body had lain had been pulled up.

Cypresses crowded the front door, cobwebby, untrimmed. He groped behind them till his fingers found a bellpush. He pressed it and inside quiet chimes went off. Dave knew the four notes. Sometime in his early teens, without quite understanding why, he had dogged the steps of a handsome boy addicted to Pentecostal meetings. The Dawson doorbell chimes picked out the start of a gospel chorus, “Love Lifted Me. ” No one came to the door. He let the second hand go around the face of his watch once and pushed the button again. Again the notes played. Again no one came. He tilted his head. Did he smell smoke?

A path went along the front of the house, cement flagstones, the moss on them gone yellow and brittle in the heat. Arm raised to fend off overgrown oleanders, he followed the path. At the house corner, it turned into cement steps with ivy creeping across them. He climbed the steps, sure now that he did smell smoke. At the top of the steps, in a patio where azaleas grew in tubs and where redwood furniture held dead leaves, a dark, stocky boy of around eighteen was burning magazines in a brick barbecue. He wore Levi’s and that was all. The iron grill was off the pit and leaned at the boy’s bare feet. He acted impatient, jabbing with an iron poker at the glossy pages blackening and curling in flames the daylight made almost invisible.