Country of Old Men Read online

  “I’ll read it with pleasure.” Dave turned for the door. The place made him so sad he couldn’t wait to get away. “And I’ll have Kevin Nakamura deliver your car this afternoon.”

  But Helmers had already pushed up out of the chair and was heading at his wounded bear’s walk for a back room, struggling to shed his jacket as he went. Through the door he opened, Dave glimpsed paper chaos, overflowing file cabinets, more teetery stacks of books, and the shapes of a computer, a monitor, a printer, all of them dusty and finger-smeared. “Thanks,” Helmers called. “Good seeing you, Dave.” And he closed the door behind him.

  The little witness had had a bath when Dave got to Madge’s big white house on the beach. She’d put him in a paisley pajama top and tied it at the waist with a flower-print scarf. He was pale and runty, with a mop of black hair and wide no-color eyes, and there was an ugly bruise on one cheekbone, but he looked very clean. He stood, sipping berry juice from a small carton, and looking out one of the broad windows of Madge’s immense white living room at the beach and the blue, sun-glittering Pacific. Surfers teetered on incoming breakers. Out yonder, sailboats tilted.

  Dave said, “Hi. I’m Dave. I’ve brought you some clothes.” He walked to the boy, crouched, opened the sack, drew out a red jogging suit. “This color okay?”

  “She threw away my underwear,” the boy said.

  “Don’t worry,” Dave said. “Here’s new underwear.” He tore the plastic wrappers off the packages of shorts and T-shirts. “Go ahead, put them on.”

  The boy looked past him at tall, gaunt, lantern-jawed Madge standing in the middle of the room watching them. Madge laughed, and went away, saying, “I won’t look.”

  “What’s your name?” Dave said.

  “Zach.” The boy untied the red scarf and wiggled the shirt off his bony shoulders and let it fall to the deep white carpet, and got into the shorts and the T-shirt. “It was Rachel who took me, but she fell asleep and I ran away.”

  “Took you from where?” Dave used his penknife to cut the price tags off the jogging togs. He laid the tags and strings and plastic stems in a white ashtray on a white table. “From home?”

  The boy pulled the small soft trousers on. Watching Dave tie the drawstring for him, he nodded. “Home.”

  Dave asked, “Where is that?”

  “Where I live.” Zach said it as if it ought to be obvious. He took the shirt and pulled it on over his head. The outfit was a little too large. Dave was less than expert on children’s sizes. So was Helmers. He and Katherine had had a child—but that was long ago. He’d been no help. The boy said, “We went to a motel. She said she had to think.” He reached into the bag and drew out white tube socks with red and blue trim. He sat down and pulled these onto his feet. “But she fell asleep.”

  Dave handed him small red-and-white jogging shoes. “Can you tell me where you live?”

  Zach studied the shoes. “She had a gun.” He put the shoes on. By blind chance, they seemed to fit.

  Dave laced them up and tied them for him. “Rachel, you mean?” He got to his feet, muscles painful, joints stiff.

  “I heard a bang, and I ran to see, and this man was laying in the breezeway, and when she saw me she put the gun in her purse and grabbed me and we ran and got in her car. We drove around and around a long time. And then she stopped and put me in the trunk.”

  Dave put out a hand to touch the bruise and Zach flinched away. Dave said, “Did she do that?”

  “No,” Zach said. “I fell and hurt myself. Before. I’m always falling and hurting myself.” Zach had set the little carton of juice on the windowsill. He got it again and sipped through the straw for a moment. Then he said, “I go around by myself at night.” He giggled. “Tessa doesn’t know. She says how can I hurt myself asleep in my bed.”

  “Go around where—the neighborhood?”

  Zach shook his head. “The apartments. Outdoors. It’s very big. There’s good places to hide nobody knows but me.”

  “Who’s Tessa—your mother?”

  “Of course.” Again, Zach was a little scornful at how ignorant Dave was. “Len’s my father. He’s a hardhat.” Zach patted the top of his head.

  “And what’s his last name?” Dave said.

  Zach sucked at the straw again, but the carton was empty. “Len,” he said.

  “Do you know your telephone number?”

  Zach looked around him. “I go to the Toyland School.”

  “And where is that?” Dave said.

  “Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.,” Zach said.

  “Tessa and Len must be looking for you,” Dave said. “Maybe they called the police. I’ve got a friend on the—”

  “We don’t call the police,” Zach said.

  Madge took Zach by the hand up a white staircase to her studio of long white drafting tables and swirling colors. Madge was as old as Dave, but she’d never given up her pursuit of sex with the ideal girl. None of her sunburned, bouncy assistants lasted long, yet it seemed to Dave she was losing her heart to a new one every time he saw her. Today’s was called Lauren, and her surprised and cheery cries of welcome to Zach rang down the stairs.

  Dave sank into one of the big square white chairs in the living room and rang Lieutenant Jefferson Leppard of L.A.P.D.’s homicide division in the glass house downtown. He was on uneasy terms with Leppard. He’d outfoxed an officer Leppard had set to protect him on a case where Dave refused to put the man’s life at risk. But now that Ken Barker, Dave’s friendly enemy in the department for thirty years, had retired, Dave had to make do with Leppard. He liked the black officer, a high-style dresser with a wry sense of humor—and he wished he’d lighten up. Given time, maybe he would. Unless Dave crossed him again.

  He sounded sore. “What is it, Brandstetter? I thought you’d retired. I thought I could breathe easy at last.”

  “Did you have a homicide last night? A shooting?”

  “Gang drive-by?” Leppard said. “Three of them.”

  “Not a gang drive-by. I don’t think so. Try a large apartment complex somewhere. Probably not too affluent.”

  “Cricket Shales,” Leppard said. “Ex-pop guitarist, busted eighteen months back for dealing drugs, just out of San Quentin. Shot with a thirty-two, out near Culver City. He had little plastic envelopes of crack in his pockets.”

  “I have a witness,” Dave said. “Only a little kid, but a witness. A friend of mine in Malibu was out walking on the beach at dawn. She’s not an exercise fiend, she’s a romantic. It’s a nice unpeopled time of day, sunrise.”

  “Perfect for a mugging,” Leppard said.

  “Not this morning,” Dave said. “This morning, here’s this grubby little boy.”

  “Not near Culver City,” Leppard said.

  “Wait a minute,” Dave said. “She asked him where he’d come from, and he said a motel, and pointed at the highway. He’d been kidnapped, but his captor fell asleep, and he got away.”

  “Active imagination,” Leppard said. “Too much TV. Look, we don’t need a witness. We know who did it—a young ex-druggie named Rachel Klein. She lives in the apartment complex. Only she’s not home this morning, is she? She was Shales’s significant other and sparring partner before he went to jail. He probably came back to claim her.”

  “Rachel—that’s what my little witness called her,” Dave said. “Rachel. She was bending over the body, holding a gun. She saw him watching her, and grabbed him and took off with him in her car.”

  “We didn’t know that part,” Leppard said.

  “Who told you the part you do know?”

  “Her new boyfriend. A brother by the name of Jordan Vickers—runs a halfway house for junkies, ex-junkies, he likes to hope. She barged in there, woke him up, said she’d stumbled on Cricket shot dead outside her door, and oh, my God, what was she going to do now? He said she ought to have phoned the police right away, but since she hadn’t, she should go straight to them now. Offered to take her, go in with her. But she was scared, hys
terical. She’d be blamed. Her old connection with Cricket would make her the obvious suspect. No way was she going to the police. She had a gun. He couldn’t stop her. She took off, and he phoned us.”

  “She didn’t tell him she had the child with her?”

  “He didn’t mention it,” Leppard said. “He would have. Jordan Vickers is a very righteous dude.”

  “No missing boy reported from that neighborhood?”

  “How old? What’s his name?”

  “Zach—no last name. I don’t know how old. He looks underfed. Spindly little mutt, black shaggy hair, light eyes. Wandering around in the middle of the night all alone in his underwear. Bruise on his cheek. He claims he fell down, but it looks to me like someone hit him. However, maybe that detail wouldn’t be in the report. People don’t like admitting to the cops they punch out their young.”

  “Too right,” Leppard said grimly. “I’ll check with juvenile, but that kind don’t always call.”

  “You sound pretty sure Rachel Klein did the shooting.”

  “She’s been in trouble with the police before—back in her old life with Cricket. Time and again. Possession. Drunk driving. Aiding in the commission of a liquor store holdup. Domestic vi-o-lence.”

  “Never a dull moment. What about her new life?”

  “Vickers claims she’s clean, a changed woman. She’s been back at her job for over a year, now—office work, some record company. He believes what she told him about finding Cricket there dead. But he doesn’t know she held back the truth about snatching your buddy Zach. That’s got to look bad, even to him. Especially to him. Like the old Rachel, right? To run and hide—that doesn’t make her look guilty enough. No, no—she has to add kidnapping.”

  “Why self-destruct in a small way?” Dave said.

  “Vickers would tell you self-destructive types can be turned around,” Leppard said.

  “The statistics are against him,” Dave said.

  “This one is,” Leppard said. “Look—you’re sure this is a lead? It seems too easy. He really called this woman Rachel, did he?”

  “He called her Rachel,” Dave said.

  “Right. I’m coming down there. Wait for me.”

  “It will take you at least half an hour,” Dave said. “I’ll use the time to drive Zach along the coast road. Maybe he’ll remember which motel it was.”

  Madge sat with Zach cuddled against her bony frame in the back of the Jaguar while Dave drove slowly along the shoulder of the coast road. Rocks fallen from the cliff face popped under the tires. Madge kept pointing out the motels to Zach as they hove in view, and in the rearview mirror Dave could see the boy frown, considering them one by one. But each time, he shook his head. It was a good many miles farther on that he said:

  “That one. The blue one. With the bird.”

  The bird was a neon seagull on a tall pole next to the highway. Dave swung the car onto a gravel driveway-parking area. He found a parking slot and switched off the engine. Madge said, marveling, “You walked all the way from here?”

  “I ran.” Zach nodded. “I didn’t want her to catch me again. I didn’t want her to put me in the trunk.”

  Dave opened the car door. “How did you remember the seagull?”

  “When she let me out of the trunk, I saw it.” He pointed. “There’s real ones on the beach.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Dave trudged to the glass door pasted over with the logos of credit card companies, and pushed into an office of simulated wood paneling and plastic plants. A pale youngster on crutches smiled at him from behind a counter. His hair was cut spiky. He wore a long T-shirt with a surfer stenciled on it, and flowered shorts that came an inch below the knee. Dave showed him his private investigator’s license. “Look at your registrations for last night, please?” The kid blinked, sat down clumsily—one of those new rigs that takes the place of the old plaster cast stiffened his right leg—and tapped buttons on a computer keyboard. A list came up on the monitor, green on black. He tapped another button, a printer ground and keened, the kid ripped off a green-lined sheet and laid it in front of Dave. He dug reading glasses from his jacket pocket and peered at the names. Rachel Klein’s was not one of them. But here was an R. Vickers. That would do. He put the reading glasses away and asked the kid, “Were you on duty last night? Three A.M.?”

  “I wondered about her,” the kid said. “You can usually pick up two, three hours’ sleep then, sitting here. Nobody but all-night truckers on the highway, nobody wanting a motel room. And here she came running, knocking at the door. We keep it locked after midnight—want a good look at anybody coming then. Shook up? I thought, ‘Who you running from, babe?’ Good looking, but her hair was all mussed, and her eyes were every place, and she couldn’t catch her breath. If she’d offered a check or a credit card, I’d have told her we were full up, sorry. But she had cash, and the Vacancy sign was on outside, and I really couldn’t think of an excuse.”

  “And she was pretty,” Dave said.

  “Yeah, really.” The kid grinned with glorious teeth. “In a bikini, you’d keel over dead. Sheeh!”

  Dave turned for the door. “Room one-eighty?”

  “She’s gone. I don’t know when. Before the maids got there. What do you want her for?”

  “Kidnapping,” Dave said. “And possibly murder.”

  The kid went pale under his sunburn. “Jesus.”

  “The little boy got away, and he’s okay,” Dave said. “But the man is definitely dead.”

  “Did she have a gun with her?” the kid asked faintly.

  “So the little boy says.” Dave smiled. “Maybe the reason you didn’t see it is that she had cash, right?”

  3

  THE APARTMENT COMPLEX HAD seen better days. It took up half a block on a side street between Washington and Jefferson. Cinnamon-brown stucco with black trim, two stories, parking space underneath, gated by heavy steel mesh. The landscaping had grown tall and brushy. The balconies were cluttered with forgotten barbecues, bicycles, bulging plastic sacks. On several, clothes hung over the straight steel railings. Holding Zach’s hands, Dave and Leppard walked into a square patio. The first block of apartments opened off this, ground-floor doors you could walk right up to, second-floor doors you climbed outside stairways and walked to along galleries.

  “This where you live?” Leppard asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  Leppard raised his eyebrows at Dave. “This is where the shooting happened.”

  “Here?” Dave looked around for marks on the cement.

  “Back there.” Leppard led Dave and the boy across the patio and into a second one. There was a third one to the side through a breezeway. That one had a swimming pool, empty except for needles from a Japanese pine that bent over it. Leppard moved toward the breezeway. “Here,” he said. Chalk outlined the shape of a human form on the paving. The paving needed sweeping and washing down, and there seemed to be a bloodstain. “Where were you?” Leppard asked Zach.

  “There.” Zach pointed a stubby finger upwards. To a gallery with apartment doors and windows along it.

  “You live up there?” Dave said.

  Again Zach shook his head. “I go around at night.” He waved both arms. “Everywhere. There used to be more lights, but now it’s mostly dark. Nobody can see me. I can hide. There’s lots of good places.”

  “Why do you want to hide?” Leppard said.

  Zach just stared at him.

  “Is there somebody you’re afraid of?” Dave said. “The one who hit you and gave you that bruise on your face?”

  Zach shook his head. “I fell down. I fall down and hurt myself sometimes.”

  “That’s what you get for going around in the dark,” Leppard said. “What were you doing up on that gallery?”

  “Going someplace,” Zach said.

  “To your apartment?” Dave said. “Is it one of those?”

  Zach said, “And then I heard the bangs. Bang, bang, bang. And I came down to see.” />
  “And Rachel saw you and took you with her in her car.”

  Zach nodded. “She brought me a chili dog in the car.” He strayed off to play with a padlock on a lean-to Dave figured probably held gardening tools. “And orange soda.”

  “In the trunk?” Leppard said.

  “No. Afterward was when she put me in the trunk.” The hasp that held the padlock came loose with a rattle. “She had to talk to somebody.” He swung open the doors of the lean-to and peered inside. “She showed me the gun, and said if I made any noise, she’d come shoot me.”

  Leppard said to Dave, “Wouldn’t Vickers love that?”

  “So you didn’t make any noise?” Dave called.

  Zach looked at him again as if he was a fool.

  A sharp voice echoed off the walls and galleries. “Zach. Zach Gruber? Is that you? Where the hell have you been? Len will beat the shit out of you—” A young woman came at a run—brassy dyed hair, too much makeup, too-tight slacks, fake-fur jacket over bulging breasts, bare feet in spike-heeled sandals, toenails brightly painted. Zach had hopped into the lean-to and was pulling the doors shut. She snatched them open, grabbed him, yanked him out. “I been looking all over for you. I was half crazy.” She had him by the arm and was propelling him away, his feet in the new jogging shoes barely touching down, when Leppard called:

  “Hold it, please, lady. Police officers.”

  She threw them a look as scared as Zach’s had been when he saw her. For a minute, Dave thought she was going to pick Zach up and make a run for it, but she changed her mind. “What for? You brought him home, did you? Where’d you find him? Where’d he get to this time?”

  Leppard went to her. “Run away a lot, does he?”

  “He—he—” She broke that off, took a breath, worked up a smile. “No, not really. He’s a pretty good kid.” She gave him a hug. He was like a rag doll, letting her hug him if that was what she wanted. He looked away at nothing. “I’ve been frantic, is all. You can understand that, can’t you?” She searched their faces. Dave twitched her a smile.