Country of Old Men Read online

  “What if her story’s fake? Rachel was scared of Cricket. She didn’t dare come out of hiding. She’d have told Karen about the gun. Karen would have gone to get it.”

  “Rachel got it,” Dave said. “Rachel was there.”

  “That doesn’t mean Karen wasn’t. I’ve talked to Rachel—she’s wacko, Dave.” He tapped his head. “I can easily picture her panicking there alone in that town house, scared Karen might run into Cricket and get hurt. So she jumps in her car to try to catch up with Karen and bring her back.”

  “Why would Cricket want to hurt Karen?”

  With a half smile, half frown, Leppard said, “You’re kidding. You know the answer to that.”

  “Jealousy?” Dave said.

  “She and Rachel were lovers. No closets for Karen. She doesn’t give a damn who knows it. Told me she and Rachel were living in paradise till Cricket broke it up. They had a fight over Rachel.” Leppard grinned. “I’m talking down and dirty here. Fists, eye-gouging, flying kicks. To hear her tell it, she damn near castrated him.”

  “No guns, though,” Dave said.

  “Not then. But why didn’t she catch up with him walking out of Rachel’s door, and grab the gun and turn it on him? After last night, I can believe that. But I’ve met Rachel now, and I can’t see Rachel doing it.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Dave said. “I never could.”

  “But we still have to hold her for the kidnapping.”

  “Then there’s Jordan Vickers,” Dave said.

  “He’s big enough.” Leppard poked thoughtfully with a ballpoint pen at the shoes. “You told him about these?”

  Dave gave a short laugh. “I still have some sense left. No, I merely asked him where he was that night. See, one of his charges came to me this morning and said Vickers lied to me earlier—he left his office that night at six-thirty, and didn’t get home till after twelve.”

  Leppard whistled, made a note with the pen, looked at Dave. “Name of the witness?”

  “Noah,” Dave said. “No last name. Chunky kid with a ponytail. Does the carpentry work around the place.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” Leppard wrote the name down. “Also to Vickers. Did he offer you an alibi?”

  “Claims some druggie called him in trouble,” Dave said. “He went off on a mission of mercy. But he won’t say who it was—even to free himself of suspicion.”

  “Really?” Leppard thought about that, nibbling his lower lip. “To protect some jump-in-the-grave junkie?”

  “Why not?” Dave said. “After all, they’re the love of his life, the street people. His reason for being.”

  Leppard eyed him closely. “I see,” he breathed at last, and nodded. “You don’t think it was one of those. You think it was somebody, with a capital S.”

  “The idea leaped to mind,” Dave said.

  “Vickers is well-known,” Leppard mused, “reputed to be one of the best in his field. He’s been on a Peter Jennings antidrug TV special, written up in the magazines.”

  “And he’s in the phone book,” Dave said.

  Leppard made a face. “Some rock star, you think? TV sitcom kid? Athlete? Politician?”

  “If,” Dave said, “it was anyone at all. I prefer to think he learned from Lou Squire where Cricket Shales was staying, picked up his trail from there, followed him around until he proved he’d come back for Rachel by stopping at her apartment at midnight, tangled with him—and did him in.”

  “Yeah.” Troubled, Leppard rubbed the back of his thick neck. “You shouldn’t have moved these shoes, you know.”

  “Tampering with evidence?” Dave reached for the phone. “Shall I call my lawyer?”

  “Abe Greenglass?” Leppard yelped. “No, please. Anything but that. No—just—just don’t do it again, okay?”

  12

  THE WEATHER WAS CHANGING. A hot dry wind was blowing from the east. In gusts. A Santa Ana. Blinking, hair blowing, he stood surprised for a moment on the broad expanse of white concrete in front of Parker Center, wondering where to eat. He’d asked Leppard to come with him, but Leppard wanted to be in the building when the unit he’d dispatched brought Vickers in. Dave had almost decided on corned beef and cabbage at Erin Go Bragh, where the tablecloths were gingham, the floors strewn with sawdust, and all the waiters seventy-five—a place his father had first taken him to when Dave was six, when it was already a venerable institution. He began to limp toward Fifth Street, when surprise stopped him. Across the street sat Chaim Chernov. In his wheelchair at the curb. Looking up the street. Waiting.

  The light was green. Dave hobbled over to him. “Maestro Chernov,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  The old singer squinted up from under the brim of a gray homburg, well brushed but bought long ago. “Who is it?”

  “Dave Brandstetter. I came to see you the other day. Looking for Rachel Klein.” He gestured at the sleek marble of the Hall of Justice. “Have you seen her?”

  “I came to help if I could. But she has been refused bail.” He snorted. “It is ridiculous.” He looked up the sunstruck street. “A murder charge, they say. An intelligent person has only to look at her to know she is incapable of such a thing.” He peered at Dave again. “Was it you who found her, then? I thought you were an able man.”

  “I found her.”

  “You’re injured? Not by Rachel, surely not.”

  “She has a friend called Karen Goddard,” Dave said.

  The old man nodded. “I remember Karen. Rachel lived with her. They were true friends, soulmates. I think Karen would have done anything for Rachel.”

  “You’re right,” Dave said. “Last night, she tried to kill me to keep me from telling the police where Rachel was.”

  Chernov was aghast. “Tried to kill you?”

  “With the same gun that killed Cricket,” Dave said.

  “Ah—so that is the reason for the murder charge.” Chernov nodded gravely to himself. “The weapon. Rachel had the weapon when she went to hide at Karen’s.”

  “That seems to be it,” Dave said.

  An old black Lincoln town car stopped at the curb and Arthur Madden got out. He was neatly dressed, but his forgettable face had an oddly blurred look. His voice sounded far away. “Here we are, Maestro.” He bent to lift the old man from the wheelchair. Across his burden, he eyed Dave blankly. “What do you want?”

  “Let me help you.” Dave opened the passenger door.

  He drank Bushmills at Erin Go Bragh. The basement place was crowded with men in suits, lawyers, brokers, accountants, eating, drinking, loud-voiced, making deals, making jokes, guffawing, worrying aloud about the wobbly stock market, arguing about a proposed change in the capital gains tax. Dave had a small table where his elbow was jostled by customers passing in and out, by the ancient waiters shuffling past in their long white aprons, and by somebody insistent. Dave looked up from his corned beef and cabbage. Into the red, bug-eyed face of Morse Campbell.

  “You saw him,” Campbell said. “What did he say?”

  “Sit down,” Dave said. “Have some lunch.”

  Campbell made an impatient face, an impatient noise, but he rattled out the old bentwood chair and sat. “I’m not here to eat. I’m here for information.”

  “He won’t budge,” Dave said.

  “Didn’t you tell him I’d pay?” Campbell yelped.

  “Calm down,” Dave said. “He doesn’t need your money. Anyway, he wouldn’t take a bribe. He’s not that kind.”

  Campbell snorted. “Every man has his price.”

  Dave shrugged, swallowed a bite of food, and looked into those bulging eyes. “Offer him Katherine back, alive and in good health. He’ll jump at that.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish,” Morse said. “Did he admit I’m in the damn book?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Dave said. “In fact, he gently but firmly refused to tell me who was or was not in it. He said there was no point in worrying us about it, since it looks as if no one wants to publish it anyway.”<
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  Campbell groaned, caught a waiter’s sleeve, and asked for Wild Turkey. “Hedging. He kept that diary.”

  “Maybe.” Dave stopped eating and sipped his own drink. The rich peat smoke of Holy Ireland. “He gave me the idea that maybe the diary never existed—that he only put that story around to worry us sinners in our beds at night.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I was his best friend. I never saw it, Morse.”

  “Not even the outside of it?”

  “Not even that.” Dave shook his head and ate another forkful of lunch. It was as good as he remembered it from ages ago. Better. He’d have to bring Cecil here soon.

  “Oh, he kept it, all right,” Morse said, and “Ah,” and “Thank you,” to the waiter who tremblingly set down his drink. “He kept it, and put us and every stupid kid thing we ever bragged about into it, and now when he’s ready to fall into his grave, he’s going to shame us all with it.”

  “I asked if he’d warn you all if he got a contract.”

  “Yes?” Campbell gulped from his glass and leaned forward. “And what did he answer?”

  “That there was no need for that, that the names of the characters, the name of the town, the school, streets, cafés, everything had been changed.”

  Morse gave his head a shake so his jowls jiggled. “It wouldn’t help. His name would be on the cover.”

  Dave smiled. “Just what I told him.”

  “And?” Keeping his gaze fixed on Dave, Campbell swigged from his Wild Turkey again. “What did he say to that?”

  “That nobody would be interested,” Dave said. “He’s not a celebrity, not a best-selling author. No one would care.”

  “Damn.” Campbell finished off his drink, set the glass down with a bang, pushed back his chair. “Stubborn Swede bastard.” He stood up. “Smug, self-righteous—”

  “Just a minute,” Dave said. “I don’t know what agency you’ve got tailing him and me, but call them off, Morse. It’s an improper use of government funds. You know that.”

  “Tailing?” Campbell pretended incredulity. He wasn’t good at acting. It was why the high school debating team had lost so often. It must have been why he hadn’t lasted as an ambassador. “You’re not serious.”

  “I’ll find out for myself, you know,” Dave said.

  “Nothing to find out.” And abruptly Campbell turned and made for the door, bulling his way through the noisy standees. He hadn’t offered to pay for his drink, had he? Dave grinned. Another example of how old money got that way.

  Dave used one of three pay phones lined against a wall in a dim hallway between darkly varnished restroom doors. At the far end of the wire the phone rang for a long time before it was answered. Celia Yamashita was out of breath.

  “Toyland School.”

  “Dave Brandstetter,” he said. “I stopped by the Grubers’ this morning. No one was home. Perhaps I can see Mrs. Gruber at work this afternoon. You want me to—?”

  She interrupted him. “I don’t think it will be any use. I think they’ve moved.”

  “What?” Dave’s heart gave a bump.

  “When I didn’t hear from you, I tried to telephone them. The number was, as they say, no longer in service.”

  “He was out of work. Maybe they didn’t pay the bill.”

  She laughed bleakly. “Mine, either, not for months. But I didn’t mind. Zach needed someplace to spend his days away from those people.”

  “I’ll make another call and get back to you,” Dave said.

  The other call was to Shadows. He recognized the voice of the sleek, mustachioed bartender. “No. She didn’t show last night. Phone’s disconnected. I think they skipped town. Mr. Zinneman’s pissed off. She’s into him for over a thousand bucks. Advances on her wages, right?”

  “A lot of people are going to be pissed off,” Dave said.

  Sergeant Joey Samuels, pale and plump behind his desk, in a room full of detectives busy at desks just like it, hung up his phone, penciled himself a note on a yellow pad, and blinked up at Dave with a faint smile. “Mr. Brandstetter, sir. Sit down. Have you heard the news?”

  “I have news”—Dave sat down—“of my own.”

  Samuels nodded. “You go first.”

  “It looks like the Grubers have skipped town.”

  “Oh, boy,” Samuels said. “We need that little kid.”

  “Put out an APB,” Dave said. “Now, what’s your news?”

  “The bullets they dug out of your rafters last night?”

  “What does the lab say?” Dave asked.

  “They were fired from Cricket Shales’s S&W thirty-two revolver, all right.” Samuels unwrapped half a sandwich, pastrami on rye. “’Scuse me,” he said, and bit into it hungrily. Mouth full, he said something to the effect that he was starving and had been trying to get to this for an hour. He chewed mightily, swallowed hard, drank Diet Pepsi from a can. “The trouble is, they don’t match the bullets that killed him.”

  Dave stared. “How could that be?”

  “The gun that Rachel Klein picked up from beside the body—it wasn’t the one that shot him.”

  “She thought it was,” Dave said.

  “We all thought it was,” Samuels said. “Didn’t we?” He took another big bite of his sandwich. “So we can’t charge her with homicide, can we, only kidnapping—which is why we need Zach Gruber.”

  “I can see that.” Dave looked toward a glass-paneled office with Leppard’s name on the door. “Where’s Jeff?”

  “Grilling the distinguished liar, Jordan Vickers.”

  Dave read his watch. “A long time.”

  “It’s interesting,” Samuels said. “And complicated. For instance, he doesn’t seem to give a damn about Rachel Klein anymore.”

  “I figured that,” Dave said, “when he wasn’t down here trying to bail her out the minute the news of her arrest came on the radio. Then, at odd moments, I’ve been wondering if it wasn’t part of a pattern that started that night, started the minute Rachel ran out of his office and drove off in a panic with little Zach in the trunk. Why did he snatch up the phone and report her to the police? The woman he’s supposedly in love with. Because he’s a responsible citizen as Leppard said? Or did he have another motive?”

  “All he can think about is how dumb he was to leave that shoe at the scene of the crime. And then not to take its mate and bury it someplace it would never be found.” Samuels licked mustard off his fingers, and picked up the other half of the sandwich. “I was sorry to have to tear myself away.”

  “Why did you?” Dave said.

  Samuels waved at his desktop. It was strewn with files and photographs and forms. “Every few minutes there’s a new homicide. How many, six, eight, since Cricket Shales stepped into the dark by that empty swimming pool.”

  Dave got up. “Which interrogation room?”

  Samuels told him.

  He rapped the door at the same time he opened it and stepped inside. A tall, lean, sulky-looking Vickers slouched in a metal chair at a bare table where three other chairs were empty, except for a jacket hanging over one. Leppard’s. The stocky lieutenant stood leaning against a wall, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, his arms folded across his chest. The slotted grill of an air-conditioning duct rattled faintly over his head, but the room was warm from body heat and smelled of cologne. Leppard’s eyes flickered somberly over Dave, but when he didn’t tell him to go away, Dave sat down. He’d begun to feel that familiar rush of awful fatigue that seemed to come now every afternoon. But he wanted to be here more than he wanted to be home resting.

  “You know Dave Brandstetter,” Leppard told Vickers.

  “To my regret,” Vickers said.

  Leppard drew breath. “All right. Karen Goddard phoned you and said she’d been asleep and when she woke up Rachel was gone, and she was afraid she’d gone back to her apartment. And you were closer, would you go find her.”

  Dave said, “Back for what reason? Had they quarreled?” />
  “Those two love birds?” Vickers glanced sourly at him and away. “No, Rachel had been fretting about her clothes. She’d gone straight to Karen’s from the Say What? office. Her clothes were all at her apartment.”

  Dave’s brows went up. “Karen Goddard told us it was Cricket’s gun she went for. A cop show on TV reminded her about the gun. That’s how Rachel explained it to Karen.”

  “When Karen talked to me,” Vickers said sullenly, “she said it was clothes.”

  Dave said, “When exactly did she talk to you?”

  “Eleven-forty. The phone was ringing when I got back from seeing—my patient.”

  “My witness says you drove in after twelve.”

  “That was the second time. He must have been asleep at eleven-forty,” Vickers said. “You mean Noah, don’t you?”

  Dave only said, “We can check Karen’s phone records.”

  “It had to be Noah,” Vickers said. “He’s left us. Not a word to me, not a word to anybody, cleared off. Wrong biblical name. Should have been Judas.”

  “He said something to that effect,” Dave answered.

  Leppard said, “So you responded to Karen’s alarm and rushed over to Rachel’s place just in time to find two men fighting in that breezeway. You almost ran into them.” He took a step and leaned on the chair back that held his jacket. He bent across the table so his face was close to Vickers’s. “But you can’t tell me what the killer looked like?”

  “It was too dark,” Vickers said.

  “Two ground lights work in the swimming pool patio,” Leppard said. “That backlit them, at least. Had to.”

  “Not enough.” Vickers shook his head helplessly.

  Dave said, “Try this. Close your eyes.”

  Vickers scowled at him, but after a second’s wait, maybe only from professional curiosity, did as he was told.

  Dave said, “Now, recall the emotion that you felt. The surprise, the fear, the impulse to run away—whatever it was. Get that back, and you’ll see what you saw that night. It works every time.”

  Vickers sat still for a minute, breathing slowly, frowning in concentration. Then his long body gave a slight jerk, he grunted surprise, his frown cleared, he opened his eyes, looked awed at Dave, and told Leppard, “Mid-thirties, medium build, five foot ten, white.”