Country of Old Men Page 6

  “Are you so sure now she didn’t kill Shales?”

  “She was clean, Mr. Brandstetter. Back at her job. Doing just fine. We had a beautiful relationship going between us. She’s a lovely, gentle girl. God gave her a beautiful voice. I was certain with the drugs and booze behind her, she’d make a career.” His face shadowed. “She’d have done it years ago if she hadn’t met Cricket.”

  “The police are sure she killed him.”

  “Have they found her? Lieutenant Leppard promised to call. I want to see her. Arrange bail, get her a lawyer.”

  “They haven’t found her. Where is she, Mr. Vickers?”

  “I only know she isn’t here.”

  Dave stood up. “Maybe here is where she’ll come to.” He laid his card on the desk. “If so, call me, will you? I want to see her, too. Because I don’t think she did it.”

  Vickers rose. “I’ll get someone to show you out.”

  “This way is fine,” Dave said, pushed open the screen door, went down rickety steps, lacy at their edges with dry rot. He took a strip of cracked walk toward the driveway. This led him past a trash module. Sticking out of heaps of rubbish was a worn blue-and-white jogging shoe. He didn’t think he’d ever seen one so large. He picked it up and looked for its mate. Not here. A squatty youth came out of the stable, brushing sawdust off his sweaty bare chest and arms, and blinking in the morning sun.

  “Help you?” he called.

  “No, thanks.” Dave took the shoe away with him.

  The address he had got from a phone book was of a long single-story warehouse in a sun-struck, beachside district of Santa Monica, where the only traffic seemed to be made up of seagulls and trucks. He left the Jaguar on tarmac gritty with blown sand and bleached and cracked by weather, and climbed steps to a block-long loading dock. He walked this dock, peering at signs beside or above or riveted to painted metal doors—signs for commercial photographers, advertising agencies, illustrators, magazine publishers, layout and design studios, mail-order merchandisers, TV production companies—until he found SAY WHAT? RECORDS, INC.

  He pushed open the heavy door and found himself in a long hallway handsomely wall-painted in bright, clean geometric shapes, and lit by fluorescent tubes suspended from studded steel rafters under a pitched metal roof. The floor of the hallway was color-coded in stripes—red, yellow, blue, green, brown, white. He blinked around him and found a directory. The blue stripe would lead him where he wanted to go. He followed it along the hallway, around several corners into other hallways. At last the blue stripe veered and climbed beside a door to a bell button. He pushed the button. A latch clicked. He stepped inside.

  He had braced himself to be met by loud music, but the only music came faintly from some far-off room. This office was quiet except for the click of computer keyboard keys under the fingers of a hefty black woman whose red-framed spectacles had thin gold chains hanging from the bows and around her neck. She turned from putting green letters on a monitor, let the glasses fall to the vast shelf of her bosom, and cocked her head at him. Plainly she didn’t know what to make of him. “The photographer for Gentlemen’s Quarterly is at the other end of the building,” she said.

  Dave grinned. “I’m not a fashion model. My name is Dave Brandstetter.” He let the ostrich-hide folder that held his license fall open for her to see. “I’m a private investigator, assisting the Los Angeles police looking into the murder of Cricket Shales.”

  She started to turn back to her work. “Police already been and gone.”

  “I’m the second wave.” Dave put the license away. “It’s about Rachel Klein—who works here.”

  “She hasn’t come back,” the woman said, “if that’s what you mean. After what she did? She’s no genius. If you know singers, especially wanna-be singers, you know they don’t run to brains—but she’s not an idiot.”

  “She had a friend on the staff here called Karen,” Dave said. “Does she still work here?”

  “Can’t get much work done, police always bothering her.”

  “I don’t think they did,” Dave said. “I’m told somehow they missed her.”

  “She’s in and out quite a bit.”

  “She was with Rachel at a bar called Shadows the night Rachel first saw Cricket,” Dave said. “That’s why I need to talk to her.”

  “That Cricket. He was nothing but trouble and misery for Rachel when he was alive. Looks like dead it’s no different—like there’s no end to it.”

  “Maybe this time she was the troublemaker. He was alive and well till he met her again.”

  “She never shot him,” the woman scoffed. “Rachel Klein? That helpless, simple little thing? No way.”

  “Drugs changed her,” Dave said. “Cost her her job here, didn’t they?”

  “Like I say—all Cricket’s fault. When they locked him up, she was all right again. Men.” She wagged her head grimly. “Nothing but bad news. I know. I had my share.”

  Dave moved toward the hallway that was bringing the faint music. “Where do I find Karen?”

  The woman picked up a telephone receiver, punched an extension number. “Karen? A Mr. Brandon here to see you. A private investigator. About Rachel.” She looked Dave over. “No, lean, blond, blue-eyed. And I’d say, just offhand, could take you to lunch at 72 Market Street if you smile pretty for him. Most likely in a Mercedes.” She hung up. “She’ll be right out.”

  “It’s a Jaguar,” Dave said. He’d kept an old prejudice. He didn’t like it for anyone to think he’d buy a German car. Or a Japanese one for that matter. “What’s her last name?”

  “Goddard.” The woman put on the red-framed glasses again and went back to work.

  And Karen Goddard appeared. Dave didn’t know what he’d expected, but not this. She was tall, rangy, masculine in her walk and voice and dress. Her handshake was strong. She led him along the hallway. They passed a recording studio door with a red light glowing above it. And a moment later, at his back, came that blast of music he’d expected earlier. But it didn’t last. The thick studio door thudded shut again. Karen Goddard showed Dave into an office where young women moved busily among ferns and ficus trees, working computers, answering telephones, ripping pages off whining printers, turning green for split seconds in the light of copiers. Pop music posters and album covers decorated the walls. Karen Goddard led him to an office of four desks cut off from the bigger room by metal and glass partitions. No one else was in the office. She closed the door and said:

  “Sit down, Mr. Brandon. What can I do for you?”

  “Lieutenant Leppard of the homicide division was here day before yesterday to ask about Rachel Klein.”

  She sat down and smiled faintly. “So they tell me. I was out of the office. At a meeting. Settling the details of a Triceratops concert at Universal Amphitheater. It’s not important. I couldn’t have told him anything.”

  “You could have told him one thing,” Dave said. “He was here about the murder of Cricket Shales, Rachel’s onetime boyfriend. And you were with Rachel the night she met him. At a club called Shadows. Maybe you introduced them.”

  She looked startled, and something more. But only for a second. She smiled. “You’re good at your job, aren’t you?”

  “We’ll see,” Dave said. “Where is she, Ms. Goddard?”

  “You think I could have told the police that, too?” She laughed. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke away. “She could be anyplace. If I were her, I’d be in Tierra del Fuego.”

  “I’ll look there next,” Dave said. “Do you think she was so frightened of him she shot him?”

  “She believed in life,” Karen Goddard said. “No—she wouldn’t have shot anyone—not even that miserable Cricket.”

  “Am I right?” Dave lit a cigarette, happy to be in company that wouldn’t frown about it. “You knew him before you took Rachel to hear him that night?”

  “A long time. He was a studio musician, a backup
artist. He used to work here, as he did for a lot of other record producers. I can’t say I knew him—but I knew his work, and whatever his drawbacks as a human being, which turned out to be worse than those of Count Dracula, he was a gifted musician. Original. Imaginative. Terrific taste. Then one of the engineers here mentioned he played weekends all the time at Shadows, and I went to hear him.”

  “And took Rachel—why?” He nodded. “That’s her desk. But two other people work here with you. Why not them?”

  “She was new here, seemed kind of lonely. Besides, they didn’t give a damn about music. Rachel loved music.”

  Dave rose, stepped to the desk with Rachel Klein’s name on it, and began opening and closing drawers.

  Karen Goddard said, “Don’t you need a search warrant?”

  “That’s strange. I don’t find any personal effects.”

  “What do you mean? This is her workplace.”

  “Women keep makeup, nail polish, that kind of thing in their desks.” He turned. “I’ll bet I’d find a lot of personal things in yours, if I looked. Lipstick, aspirin, chewing gum, Rolaids, cologne, God knows.”

  “Men do it, too,” she said defensively.

  “True. Did she know Cricket was out of prison?”

  “She’d have told me. She thought he’d be in for years.”

  “Then why did she take her things?” Dave said.

  Karen Goddard only stared at him. Not in fright, no. Something grimmer. But he didn’t ask what. She wouldn’t tell him. He said thank you and good-bye, and left.

  7

  A YELLOW RENTAL PANEL truck was parked, facing the street, in the driveway of the small stucco house in Van Nuys. A pair of trees of heaven bowed over squares of unmowed lawn. Dave pushed trailing branches aside to go up the path to the door. He pressed the bell button there, but the response came from the driveway. A voice called, “What do you want?” Dave looked. A short old man with a shock of white hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses slid a carton into the truck and came across the grass, brushing dust from his hands. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow. His trousers were old and shapeless, the kind kept for household chores. “I’m Irwin Klein. Did you want to see me?”

  Dave showed him his license and told him his name and the reason he’d come.

  Klein said, “The police were already here. A black man named Leppard—a little bit like his namesake, too. And a nice Jewish boy named Samuels.”

  “I’ve heard their report,” Dave said. “There’s nothing in it about Rachel’s whereabouts.”

  “She isn’t here,” Klein said glumly. “She wouldn’t come here. It made me laugh to think the police would believe she’d come running to me when she was in trouble. Who am I to help her? Only her father, who loved her from babyhood, my only child, child of my old age, I who gave her—” He broke that off, and turned for a moment to watch a youngish, soft-looking man in T-shirt and jeans hoist another carton into the yellow truck. He called, “Did you list them all?”

  “Every title, Mr. Klein,” the man said wearily.

  “And you numbered the carton? And the number is on the list?”

  “It’s on the clipboard. You want to see it?”

  Klein shook his head. “Just don’t miss any—that’s all I ask. That Fliegel will claim he didn’t get this, he didn’t get that. He’ll try to cheat me.”

  “I won’t miss any.” The man went back up the driveway and out of sight.

  “I lost my shop,” Klein said. “An Iranian bought the building and raised the rent. I was barely able to hang on as it was. Pay four times more? In that location, with robbers walking in off the street? No way.”

  Dave remembered now where he’d met Klein. “The bookshop on Santa Monica near Fairfax?”

  “‘The Shakespeare Head,’” Klein smiled. “You remember it?” He peered through those thick lenses. “Maybe you were a customer once?”

  “More than once, Mr. Klein,” Dave said. “It was a good shop. You moved the books here, did you?”

  “To my garage.” His laugh was mournful. “While I looked for another place. They’re all too expensive.” He opened the door of the house, gestured Dave inside. “I’m too old to start again, anyway.” The living room was cool and dim. Leading the way through it, and through a dusty dining room, and into a sun-bright kitchen, he went on talking. “This city has run money mad. What do they care for books? The lives and wisdom of the best minds of the past? What does any of that mean to hustlers and gangsters? They call themselves businessmen, but they’re not.” He opened a refrigerator and brought out bottles of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic. “Gouging decent people, paying off officials to get their way.” He pried the caps off the squatty bottles. “Respect for literature, art, music—not unless there’s a profit to be made.” He took drinking glasses from a dish rack beside the sink, set them on the table of a breakfast nook. “We had a beautiful public library in this city. Downtown. You remember that library?”

  Dave nodded and poured celery tonic into his glass.

  “Well, do you know what happened to it? Developers wanted the land it stands on. So they hired an arsonist to burn it out. He was never caught. Shall I tell you why?” Klein drank off half his celery tonic, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, belched. “Because the authorities were bribed to fumble the investigation. Why not? These big developers have millions to buy whatever they want—while the homeless starve and freeze, and the second largest city in America goes without a public library. It stands there, but empty. And you’ll see—one of these days, it will be gone.”

  “You were telling me about Rachel,” Dave said.

  Klein blinked, frowned. “Ah, yes. Of course. Excuse me. I’m upset. Losing my shop—it’s the last piece of my life I had left. First Rachel, then my wife—she died after three operations, a year in the hospital—and now my shop. Everything that meant anything to me. All gone.”

  “Why did you lose Rachel?”

  “Because of Cricket. She brought him to meet me. He was trash. A wonderful musician, she said. His music was also trash. I knew he’d mean the end of her. I told her so. And she never came back. When her mother was dying, I went to find her.” Klein winced. “I didn’t know her. She looked terrible, sick, starved, she didn’t talk sense—as if she’d lost her mind. She used filthy language—my little Rachel.”

  “It was the drugs talking,” Dave said.

  “She’d always loved her mother, they were friends, true friends. But, no, she wouldn’t go to her. I told her her mother was begging to see her. ‘Please come now,’ I said, ‘there’s not much time left. She’s slipping away from us, Rachel.’” Tears leaked from under the thick spectacles. “She ran into a bedroom and locked the door. I could hear her weeping. I knocked on the door. ‘Please, Rachel, come on now, hurry.’ But she wouldn’t open the door. She screamed at me to go away. She was sobbing so I could hardly make out the words, but these I heard—‘She wouldn’t know me, anyway, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’m not her Rachel anymore.’”

  “Mr. Vickers tells me she’s changed now.”

  “How changed—to shoot a man, even such a man as that, in cold blood? By you, that’s changed?”

  “I don’t think she did it, Mr. Klein,” Dave said. “And neither do you.”

  Klein lifted his hands and let them fall. “What do I know? I thought I knew her. Music. She loved music. The finest music.” He peered at Dave through those lenses again. “You say you visited my shop. Then you know I always had classical music on the radio. Softly. In the background. It was the same at home. She was raised surrounded only by the best symphonies, concertos, chamber music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—the finest orchestras, the greatest conductors, never mind some of them were Nazis.”

  “I’m told she had a beautiful voice,” Dave said.

  “Rich and deep. Her high school teacher called it a huge voice. We took her to our cantor—a great singer in his time, Chaim Chernov—you’ve heard of him, maybe?”

 
; Dave nodded, recalling a lieder recital, long ago, in a wooden auditorium at some Westside park. Brahms, Schubert, Mahler. A tenor like a golden bell.

  “He said she should think seriously about the opera.” The memory thrilled Klein. He placed his hands together in front of his mouth, his eyes bright, and said again, in an awed whisper, “The opera.”

  “She was working for Say What? Records when she met Cricket,” Dave said. “How was that?”

  “To pay rent on her own place in Los Angeles,” Klein said. “Chernov retired as cantor, and left the valley for an apartment he owns there. He was her teacher, her mentor, her god—she had to be near him.” His face clouded. “I should have kept her here. Her mother didn’t want her to go. She knew already she was sick, sicker than she told either of us. But she smiled and let her move away because it would be best for her future. She had to study, to practice, to learn. So much. The days when a singer could simply sing, those days are gone, you know. These young artists today—they know harmony, counterpoint, what can I tell you? A dozen languages, history, dancing, acting—”

  “And then she met Cricket,” Dave said.

  Klein scowled. “And that was the end of her.”

  “Jordan Vickers thinks she made a complete recovery.”

  “What does he know? A man who goes around with his head shaved and wearing earrings and rags? What kind of authority is he supposed to be? A onetime basketball player, Rachel said, when he brought her here to see me. What can a basketball player know? They pay them to play basketball at college—they don’t have to learn anything. Half of them can’t even read.”

  “He tried to reunite the two of you,” Dave said. “Didn’t that make you think well of him?”

  Klein slid out of the breakfast nook. “Until she told me they were sleeping together. I don’t think well of a man who would do that.” He opened a door under the sink and dropped the empty bottles into a trash basket there, and closed the door. “Or a woman either.” He turned and picked up the empty glasses and set them in the sink. He shook his head. “Rachel, Rachel.”