Country of Old Men Read online

  “Wearing anything special?”

  Vickers made a face. “I don’t—yeah, flight jacket. Leather. Couldn’t see the color.”

  “Identifying marks, beard, long hair?”

  Vickers shook his head. “Plain vanilla,” he said.

  “You didn’t try to break up the fight?” Dave said.

  “The gun went off. When guns start going off, I dive for cover. Bullets don’t care who they hit.”

  “The killer got away. How? Did he run past that locker where you were hiding?”

  “I didn’t hear him. When it was all silence, I started to get out. Somebody had to call the police. Then I heard footsteps coming. I was the only one around. They’d think I was the killer.” He glanced at Leppard. “Isn’t the black man always the killer?”

  “You tell me,” Leppard said.

  “I stayed where I was,” Vickers said glumly. “If I’d known it was Rachel, I’d have jumped out, and none of this would be happening.”

  “Scares me when you sleep like that,” Cecil said. He stood over Dave, who sat groggily on the side of the bed. Dave hadn’t switched on the lamp, but the clock’s red numerals glowed. It was nine-twenty-five. “I came and spoke to you at five-thirty, at six, seven, eight. Last time, I even shook you. You were snoring. You never snore.”

  Dave sketched him a smile. “I’m too refined.” He reached up and took Cecil’s hand. “I’m sorry I worried you. I kept going too long again today. Can’t break the habit.”

  “Try,” Cecil said, “Please?” He returned the pressure of Dave’s grip, let his hand go, swung back for the stairs. “Drink? Dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Dave pushed stiffly to his feet. “I will visit the bathroom.” He fumbled the red-and-white pack and his lighter from the bedside table and lit a cigarette. “You pour me a drink, please.” He put on his blue corduroy robe and hobbled wincing downstairs. “And we’ll see.”

  When he came out of the bathroom, Cecil was sitting on the couch with brandy in a large bubble glass, swirling it slowly, staring down into it, brooding. Dave picked up his whiskey from under the lamp and, moving with pain, stretched out on the couch and laid his head in Cecil’s lap.

  “What kept you going?” Cecil said.

  Dave told him all about his day. It took a long time. “Vickers denies he owns a gun.”

  “Wouldn’t be too smart, I guess,” Cecil said, “with all those druggies around there.”

  “Ex-druggies,” Dave said, “reformed characters.”

  Cecil said, “What’s the backslider rate—five to one?”

  “You’re right,” Dave said, “but Leppard is going to tear up that rackety old place of his, searching for it. Because Vickers isn’t smart, or he wouldn’t have been so careless about those shoes. He also wouldn’t have told so many lies. If he was innocent, he wouldn’t have pointed the police at Rachel that night, he’d have come forward as a witness. He knew then it wasn’t Rachel who killed Cricket Shales.”

  “Unless he’s lying to protect her now.”

  “She doesn’t need that anymore,” Dave said. “Not on the murder charge. Zach and Vickers said she had the gun—that was what convinced Leppard she was the killer. But now he knows it was the wrong gun. No, Vickers was trying to direct suspicion away from himself that night, and he still is.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That he killed Cricket. Got that excited phone call from Karen Goddard, tore over to West Hollywood as she asked him to, met Cricket coming out of Rachel’s apartment, figured Cricket was there to claim Rachel, when all he’d gone inside for was to get his gun back—”

  “Which did him no good whatever,” Cecil said.

  Dave tasted the Scotch and breathed a scornful laugh. “‘Mid-thirties, medium build, five ten, white.’ Really.”

  “What does Len Gruber look like?” Cecil said.

  “Jesus.” Dave sat up, cold whisky splashing from his glass. He stared at Cecil. “How did you guess?”

  “L.A.P.D. put out a bulletin on him?” Cecil asked.

  “This afternoon,” Dave said.

  Cecil’s brandy was gone. He leaned forward and set the bubble glass on the bricks of the raised hearth. “You ready to eat something now?”

  “Any avocados in the cookshack? Any salsa?”

  “One avocado omelet”—Cecil stood—“coming up.”

  13

  THE HEAVY IRON KNOCKER on the door to the rear building clattered. Dave’s heart gave a lurch. Cecil made a noise, and sat up straight in bed. Gray showed above the leaf-strewn skylight. It drew a pearly outline around the young man’s lean, black form. Dave put a hand on his arm, and blinked at the clock. Five-twenty. The knocker went again. Cecil scrambled off the bed, kicked into jeans.

  “Those Girl Scouts get out earlier with their cookies every year.” He started for the stairs.

  “Be careful.” Dave swung his feet to the floor and reached, flinching at the soreness in his shoulder, for the drawer that held the Sig-Sauer. “Take the gun.”

  “No way.” Cecil ran down the stairs. “Who is it?”

  No one answered. The only noise from outside was the shrill wake-up chatter of birds. The steady surf sound of traffic from Laurel Canyon Boulevard far below hadn’t yet begun. Dave pulled on pants and shirt, slid his feet into plimsolls, got the gun from the drawer, thrust it into his waistband, and started down the stairs himself.

  The knocker went again. “Mr. Brandstetter?” The accent was Spanish. Dave knew the voice.

  Cecil asked again, “Who is it, please?”

  Dave said, “It’s all right.” He reached the stair foot, went up the room, combed back his hair with his fingers, and opened the door. He heard Cecil gasp. The man outside was compact, brown-skinned, in his middle sixties. His name was Alejandro Hernandez, and apart from the mayor, he was the most powerful politician in Los Angeles, and had been for twenty years. Yet now he was dressed like a migrant field worker. Cheap windbreaker, baseball cap, tennis shoes. He didn’t smile. “Mr. Brandstetter? Al Hernandez. We have met before. May I come in?”

  “Please do.” Dave backed and stepped on Cecil’s foot. Cecil didn’t make a sound. He was too awed. He stepped aside quickly. When Hernandez had crossed the threshold, Dave introduced the two of them, and after they’d shaken hands, Cecil said, “Would you like some coffee—sir?”

  Hernandez moved down the room. “Don’t trouble yourself. This will be only a brief visit.”

  “Coffee,” Cecil murmured, and went to fix it.

  Hernandez stood with his back to the fireplace. Dave went to him. “Won’t you sit down? When did we meet?”

  “In the district attorney’s office,” Hernandez said indifferently. “Years ago. Ken Barker introduced us. You were making difficulties in the Rouderbusch case.”

  “Ah.” Dave sat in one of the wing chairs. “If I hadn’t made difficulties, Rouderbusch would still be locked up for a murder he didn’t commit.”

  Hernandez hinted at a smile and nodded his head. “And now I am going to make difficulties. With the same result in mind.”

  “Is that so?” Dave cocked his head. “About whom?”

  “Jordan Vickers,” Hernandez said.

  “This is really a matter for the police,” Dave said. “Lieutenant Jefferson Leppard, Homicide Department, is in charge of the case.”

  Hernandez nodded. “Yes, that I know. The shooting death of one Howard Ronald Shales, known as Cricket to his friends—”

  “If he had any friends,” Dave said. “Certainly Jordan Vickers wasn’t one of them.”

  “I have talked to Lieutenant Leppard,” Hernandez said, and looked hard at Dave. “And he tells me that it is not he but you whose—understanding I must seek.”

  Wary Leppard, covering his ass. Dave said, “Wait a minute, Councilman. You came here incognito. You chose this hour because the usual reporters wouldn’t be watching.”

  “This will be strictly a private conversation between the two of us
. Off the record. Known to no one else.”

  “I wish I could guarantee that,” Dave said.

  Hernandez frowned. “I was told you were absolutely trustworthy. Not only by Lieutenant Leppard but by our old friend Barker.”

  “I appreciate it,” Dave said. “That’s not the point.”

  Hernandez narrowed his eyes. “What is the point?”

  “That I’m under surveillance,” Dave said. “Not in the Shales matter. It’s something else, no connection. But I am being watched.”

  Hernandez looked sharply around him. “By whom?”

  “I don’t know, but since I do know who’s behind it, it pretty well has to be a federal agency. They’re keeping tabs on my every move, on my house, everyone who comes and goes.”

  “Damn.” Hernandez went to the door and looked out.

  “So you picked a poor time, and a poor place.”

  Hernandez looked at the bookcases, the watercolors, the rafters, the lofts. “Electronically?”

  Dave lifted his shoulders. “Who can say?”

  “Come outside.” Hernandez went into the courtyard, dry oak leaves crunching under his rubber soles. He took up a place on the far side, under a clump of tall, slender eucalyptus trees. He cleared his throat, and said in a low voice, “Jordan Vickers was helping me, that night. I was the one who telephoned him. At six-twenty-five P.M. He was with me until eleven-fifteen.”

  Dave said, “You’ll never convince me you have a drug problem, Councilman. I’d have to read it in the Times.”

  “I want your pledge of confidentiality on this,” Hernandez said. “I was never here. I never said this to you.”

  “You know I can’t give you that,” Dave said.

  “I am in a position to return the courtesy.”

  “It’s not necessary. If I can keep your story to myself, I will. If it means lying under oath, I won’t.”

  “It was for my grandson,” Hernandez said. “Ricardo. We have tried every sort of treatment, the best hospitals. Vickers is the only one who has ever made any difference.”

  “Except it doesn’t last,” Dave said.

  Hernandez made a face. “Never for long. About the time we begin to breathe again, and feel the worst is over—”

  “What happened this time? All this secrecy—it wasn’t just drugs your grandson was in trouble over. What was it—a Seven-Eleven holdup, a stolen TV, a hit-and-run?”

  Hernandez’s Aztec face hardened in its frame of straight white hair. “You are not the man I thought you were,” he said between clenched teeth. “You are a man of stone.”

  “What did you do—buy off the victim, the arresting officers?”

  Hernandez stalked away. A moment later a car door slammed tinnily out front, a cheap little engine coughed to life, and tires shrieked angrily away down Horseshoe Canyon trail. The second most powerful politician in Los Angeles must have raided a junkyard for a car to match the clothes he’d chosen as a disguise. A rich smell of coffee drifted from the cookshack, and Dave went to get some.

  That phone call of Karen Goddard’s nagged him. That Vickers had been out half the night Cricket was killed made Dave wonder if she’d rung up anyone else for help. But he didn’t want to bother Leppard—busy turning that monster rabbit warren of Vickers’s upside down looking for a gun Dave doubted could be found—with what was only a hunch. Often over the years he’d tracked down phone calls on his own with the help of Ray Lollard. Besides, it was past time he saw his old friend face-to-face. They talked on the phone, and Ray sometimes wrote asking for contributions to prop up this or that lost cause in the field of sculpture, painting, photography. But they hadn’t met for ages.

  He swung the Jaguar into a white gravel driveway that curved in front of a hulking mansion on West Adams Boulevard. Big dark old deodars loomed up on broad lawns where a young man drove a noisy power mower. He was sun-browned, muscular, and shirtless. Of course. What fun would there be for Ray Lollard in looking out his stained-glass-framed bay windows at an uncomely gardener? Years ago, Ray had bought this place when it was a rat-infested wreck of a roominghouse, and lovingly, lavishly restored it to its 1880s glory. He was a senior vice president with the telephone company, and owned a lot of stock. He could afford it.

  Others who could afford it and who had a mission to rescue the past had restored scores of such places in this sadly rundown district in the sixties and seventies. Where had the poor people gone? Ray and friends didn’t like the question, and Dave didn’t ask it. But privately he figured they’d be back before much longer. Gentrification rarely stays put. The fixer-uppers had now climbed into the old hills, June Street and the like. All those pinched Gothics on narrow, high-shouldered lots, scrollwork porches, spindly towers, curved windows, etched-glass double doors. Out with the dry rot, on with the new paint. Climbing stiffly out of the car, he cringed, remembering the colors—Mexican pink, lavender, dusty rose, sunflower yellow. Shaking his head, he climbed to the porch and twisted a big brass key that jangled a bell inside.

  He had known Ray Lollard for fifty years. He didn’t know the young man who opened the door, blond, with a flattop haircut and an earring. He wore a houseman’s coat, and in a different style was as good looking as the gardener. He had a bright defenseless smile. “Good morning,” he said as if it were a treat to get to say it.

  “When I phoned his office, they told me Mr. Lollard was at home,” Dave said. “I’m Dave Brandstetter. Would you tell him I’m here, please?”

  “He’s out.” The boy checked a wristwatch. “He ought to be back any minute. Do you—want to come in and wait?”

  Dave stepped into the hall. “Thank you.” The hall was awash in antique carousel horses, cracked lifesize painted wood carvings of Victorian children, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century signboards, nineteenth-century naif paintings of cows in gilded frames against florid wallpaper in many shades of red. The white-coated lad led him into a parlor of buttoned plush sofas and chairs, shawl-draped tables crowded with knickknacks, Dresden shepherdesses, the silver heads of walking sticks. A bow-front cabinet was filled with tin throat-lozenge boxes and old jars and bottles of a hundred uses and bizarre colors. Yards of green velvet swooped at the windows. Layers of Oriental rugs were spongy underfoot, their colors rich and various as jewels. He kept getting startling glimpses of himself in half-hidden mirrors, small and large, down here, up there, seemingly everywhere. A spindlework harmonium gazed at him with round ivory stops. He sat on its tufted stool, pumped the pedals, played a chord. The old reeds wheezed for him. Then he heard the front door open, and went into the hallway.

  With Ray on one side and the houseboy on the other, Kovaks was being helped to walk. Kovaks was a brilliantly gifted potter. He and Ray had first met at Dave’s house. Dave knew him now because of his wild bush of hair—not all black anymore, shot with gray. He wouldn’t have known him otherwise. He was terribly thin. The ragged T-shirt and faded jeans, worn out at the knees and back pockets, that had always been Kovaks’s uniform, didn’t conceal that he was scarcely more than a skeleton. His sunken black eyes saw Dave now and tried to work up a lascivious gleam, but it was no use. He forced a grin. It was like a death’s head. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, “doing anything tonight?”

  Ray was his old elegantly dressed self, not a hair out of place, just maybe a few pounds heavier than the last time he and Dave had met. He looked eloquently at Dave and then up the stairs, and he didn’t stop moving Kovaks along. Dave stepped in front of the three men all the same, and made them halt by taking Kovaks in his arms and holding him close for a long time. Kovaks smelled of disinfectants.

  He feebly returned Dave’s hug with arms like sticks, and asked, “Why couldn’t you have done this when I was trying like crazy to get you into the sack? We could have made beautiful music together.”

  “Dissonant,” Dave said. “I was spoken for, remember? Doug Sawyer?” Kovaks was harking back to events long past. “Anyway—if I’d weakened, you’d never have got Ray.”

>   “Dave,” Ray said sharply, “let him go. He has to lie down. He’s only not in the hospital because he raised such hell there I couldn’t leave him any longer.”

  Dave stepped back. “Forgive me.”

  He watched Ray and the houseboy start upstairs with the sick man. Kovaks tried feebly, fretfully to hang back. “No, no. The carriage house. I have to work.”

  Ray threw Dave another hopeless glance. This time he looked to be on the edge of tears. But his voice was steady and kind when he said to Kovaks, “Next week, baby, when we’ve had a chance to feed you up, and you’re feeling stronger.” He started up the stairs again. “Come on, sweetheart. Try to walk, it will tone up your leg muscles.”

  Kovaks sighed, coughed, and did his best to set his feet in their threadbare canvas shoes on the steps and to climb. He wasn’t wearing socks. His ankles showed dark lesions—Kaposi’s sarcoma. “Next week,” he said, “I could be dead. I’ve got work to finish, Ray, God damn it. Who the hell is going to remember me if I don’t finish my work?”

  “I’ll remember you,” Ray said to him again. “Anyway, you’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you die.”

  “Put me back in that hospital,” Kovaks said, “and I’ll die, all right.” A small bloodstain appeared on the seat of those ragged jeans and began to spread. “It’s all they do there. Try to kill you. One less faggot, right?”

  “You’re home now,” Ray said. “They can’t get you here.”

  Dave turned away, went out through the open door, and stood on the porch, back turned to the hallway, waiting for Ray. He didn’t see the trees, the sky, the lawn-mower jockey, the passing traffic. Something was wrong with his eyes.

  He knew and didn’t know the young woman waiting for him when he jounced the Jaguar down off the trail into the brushy brick paved yard of the canyon place. She sat on a rock, and drew with a pencil in a big spiral-bound sketch pad on her knees. The place was picturesque, God knew, ragged, rustic. But aside from little blue-eyed Hilda Vosper, his neighbor up the road, artists hadn’t swarmed to memorialize it. A white Mercedes four-door stood in the yard. He bypassed it and parked the Jaguar next to the French-windowed wall of the front building. He got out, slammed the door, and the girl stood up. She wore a big loose shirt and jeans, a little print scarf knotted at her slender throat, sandals, a straw hat whose flat crown was wrapped by another print scarf.