Country of Old Men (10 page)

Chernov paid him no mind. He said, “Cricket had that kind of tenor, light, lyric, untroubled, pure through the whole range. Perfect pitch. A well-trained musician, too.” He gave a disgusted puff. “Of course, he had developed bad vocal habits, singing cheap music. But I could have trained him out of those. And to breathe. You know, ninety percent of singing is in the breathing. See here?” He took a silver-framed photograph down from the piano. “Here they are together. She sent this to me.” He passed the picture to Dave. A pair of slender youngsters, both with long blond hair, faded jeans, bulky sweaters, arms around each other, grinned at the camera. “Aren’t they pretty? Wouldn’t they have made a picture on the stage? And such voices—”

Dave set the photo back in place and gave him the date of the murder. “She didn’t come here the next morning?”

“I tell you—” Arthur began.

“I’d like the maestro to tell me,” Dave said.

The old man shook his head. “After that visit with Cricket, she never came back. She promised she would. She promised to bring him with her. She sent the photo, but…” The sentence trailed dolefully off, and the tears started again. “No, she did not come that day.”

Arthur stood behind the wheelchair and put his hands gently on the old man’s shoulders. He looked at Dave and now those wintry gray eyes almost showed emotion. They pleaded. “Leave him alone, now, will you? Just go?”

“Thank you, Maestro,” Dave said.

“Good-bye,” Chaim Chernov said, and Arthur wheeled him away. Dave didn’t leave. He sat down and picked up an art book from a carefully polished coffee table. John Singer Sargent. He spent about twenty minutes with it, stunned as he always was by the panache of Sargent’s brushwork. And then Arthur came into the room again, and Dave closed the book and laid it down. It was heavy and made a thump. Arthur jumped at the sound. “Why haven’t you gone?”

“You a relative of Mr. Chernov’s?” Dave said.

A headshake. “Just a friend.”

“A vocal student?” Dave wondered.

“I told you he doesn’t teach anymore. Anyway, I have no talent. But I’ve listened to great music all my life, and I love it, if it’s any of your business.”

Dave frowned. “You’re a nurse—right?”

“Wrong. I’m exactly what I said—a friend. He doesn’t need a nurse, not yet. He needs someone to look after him, clean the house, cook the meals, do the shopping, take him to the doctor, run the other errands. He needs someone who cares about him. There’s nothing so pathetic as a great man past his time. You don’t know what ‘alone’ means till you’ve seen it. If you knew the condition I found him in here—”

“How did you happen to do that—find him, I mean?”

“I’m in real estate.” Arthur took a business card from a shirt pocket and gave it to Dave. Wynn-Madden, Inc. “Arthur Madden.” His hand was chilly, the handshake brief. “Mr. Chernov is the owner of this building. I’d heard he was ill. He’s eighty-five. I thought he might want to sell. They do, you know. They move to retirement communities. But he needs a large place.” Arthur gestured. “You can see why—all these antiques, paintings, enormous record collection, virtually every room a museum, and so many photos, clippings, playbills from his life in music, clear back to Europe in the twenties. To give all that up for some cramped little condo among the walking dead. He couldn’t bear the thought.”

“Right. Does he pay you?”

Madden bridled. “Certainly not.”

“But it must be a full-time job. Surely it takes you away from your business.”

“Money isn’t everything. I couldn’t bear to see him here neglected, sick, no one—and I mean not a soul—offering one bit of help, not even an hour’s company, for heaven’s sake. A man who’d given the world so much beauty. It broke my heart. God, how rotten the human race can be sometimes.”

Dave stood up. “Not you,” he said.

Madden smiled. There wasn’t any warmth in it. “He appreciates it. It’s very touching.”

Dave moved toward the entry hall, the street door. “And that’s all the reward you need?” He opened the door. Madden was right. The apartment was cold. The sunny air outside was at least ten degrees warmer. On the doorstep he frowned. Up the street the sun glinted on the pale hair of a man getting into a parked car. Samuels? The car drove off. Dave turned back to Madden. “He has no relatives?”

“Killed in the Holocaust,” Madden said. “Nobody left. Believe me, I’ve searched.”

Dave smiled. “I’ll just bet you have.”

It was built over with expensive town houses now, but he could remember when this place was marshland. A misty morning came to mind, the silhouette of a blue heron among the reeds, poised on one stilt leg above a glassy pond. You didn’t see red-winged blackbirds in L.A. anymore. Once they’d been thick down here swinging on the tall reeds, the air alive with their sharp calls. Dragonflies used to hover and dart, sun glistening on their wings, their glittering blue and green and red needle bodies. In autumn, fleeing the cold north, great noisy flocks of migrating ducks had swirled down out of this sky to feed. And now?

Tarmacked streets curved, empty in the morning light, and very quiet. He found the address he wanted and parked the Jaguar. When he walked up the concrete strip between ground ivy to find the black door in the brown shiplap wall, he could hear the thud of surf on the beach, blocks away. He stood in a breezeway and listened for sounds of life from the handsome houses, built so close together. No morning radio talk shows, no loopy cartoon music. He laughed at himself. Children in an enclave like this? He guessed not. Upwardly mobile young couples, both working, no kids. Nobody home.

He knew she wasn’t home. He had checked by phone at her office. She was at work. She’d picked up her extension and let him hear her voice before he’d hung up. All the same, he thumbed her bell push. Chimes answered. That was all. He put on his reading glasses, bent, and peered closely at the lock. From his wallet he took a sliver of metal and probed the lock with it. The lock turned, but the door didn’t yield. He stood for a moment with his shoulder against the door, blinking thoughtfully. Then he went looking for a back door.

There was a back door, its lock simpler than that on the front one, but the door didn’t yield either. He sighed, slid the sliver of metal back into his wallet, dropped the wallet into his pocket, folded the glasses with a click, pushed them into their case, tucked the case away. He returned to the silent, empty street, and pulled open the door of the Jaguar. But before he got inside, he paused to give the house a long, steady look. The curtains at the windows were all closed. And motionless. Someone was in there, but either that someone didn’t give a damn who’d come ringing, or was too scared to risk peeping out and being seen. That would figure, if it was Rachel Klein. On the other hand, it could be a deaf cleaning woman. He wouldn’t phone Leppard about it. Not just yet.

He dropped onto the seat, closed the door, started the engine. And in the side mirror he glimpsed again the man with pale hair getting into a pale car far off up the street. Samuels. This time he was sure of it. Leppard was watching over Dave again, not believing Dave would lead him to Rachel Klein, no. Just trying to protect an old has-been from his own folly. No fool like an old fool. Damn. How he hated that. He released the hand brake, and the Jaguar roared off. It wasn’t young, either, but it could still go.

D
AVE USED THE TELEPHONE
back of the dark-paneled little bar at Max Romano’s. He told Jeff Leppard, “When I went to see Jordan Vickers, he lied to me. He said he didn’t know Cricket Shales was back in town. He knew. He’d asked Lou Squire to warn him. And Lou warned him.”

“Then why didn’t Vickers warn Rachel?”

“I think he did, and that’s why her personal things aren’t in her desk at Say What? Records. He rang her there and told her to go somewhere Cricket wouldn’t find her.”

“And then let her walk right into Cricket’s face in the dark on her way home to her apartment at midnight?”

“You figure it out,” Dave said. “You’re the detective. I’m just a senile old man messing around in your case. Will you tell Samuels to stop wasting his time?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leppard said.

“The last time he tried to guard me,” Dave reminded him, “he was shot and didn’t get over it for months. I don’t want that to happen again. He could be killed this time.”

“Then go home and leave this case alone,” Leppard said.

“Talk to Vickers,” Dave said. “Find out why he lied.”

He hung up and, five minutes later, walked out of the steamy, flame-sizzling, pan-clattering kitchen of Max Romano’s into the sunny parking lot. A slim little Vietnamese wrapped in a long white apron followed him. Dave opened the trunk of the Jaguar and the boy bent and set a bottle in an ice bucket inside, along with Styrofoam boxes sealed shut with tape to keep in the heat. He straightened, gave Dave a little smile, a little bow, and headed back for the kitchen. He looked about twenty years old. He called himself Pow, and every time he said it, he made a fist, stuck it straight out, and giggled. Alex told Dave he was the best apprentice chef he’d ever had. He was certainly the prettiest. A flower. Smiling to himself, Dave watched him until he disappeared into the kitchen, then closed down the trunk, got into the car, and headed for Topanga.

Fifty minutes later, he found Jack Helmers’s crooked, climbing dirt road. Piled in the overgrown brush next to the mailbox were twine-bound stacks of newspapers, cardboard cartons full of rumpled magazines, catalogues, fliers, big green plastic trash sacks bulging with God knew what. God knew why. After years of indifference, what had prompted Helmers suddenly to clean house? Dave parked the Jaguar in the driveway behind Helmers’s grimy gray 1979 Dodge Colt. He took boxes and bottle from the trunk and carried them up the steps to the deck where cats snoozed in the sun.

The inner door was open. He rapped the aluminum screen door. The dogs came running, barking, tails waving happily. Over their racket, Dave called, “Jack? It’s Dave—Dave Brandstetter.” The dogs jumped at the screen. “I’ve brought us some lunch.” But Helmers didn’t answer. “Jack? You in there?” No response, no sign of the man. Dave opened the screen and with the dogs jumping around his legs made his way through the room, which was still dusty and cobwebby, but not quite so cumbered with trash as last time. He peered into Helmers’s workroom. Among the tilted heaps of manuscripts, clippings, file folders, the computer monitor glowed with green words, but the writer wasn’t at his desk.

The food had kept hot in the car trunk—the boxes warmed his hands and chest. The noonday heat didn’t need their help. He wanted to put them down. He found a kitchen swing door, called “Jack?” again, and pushed into the room. One of the dogs was still with him. It ran around a cluttered table, and whined and nosed at something on a vinyl-tiled floor that hadn’t seen a mop or even a broom in years. Dave stepped around the table. A chair had tipped on its side. Helmers had been sitting in the chair. He lay on the floor. On his side. Snoring. In a wrinkled cotton flannel plaid shirt and grubby jeans, cheeks bristly with three days’ beard, he looked like a skid-row wino. But the only drink in sight was half a mug of coffee on the table.

Dave set boxes and bottle on a counter and knelt beside him. The dog licked his face, anxious, whimpering. “That’s all right,” Dave told him. “Don’t worry.” He pushed the dog off, and lifted Helmers’s thick wrist. The pulse beat there strong and steady. He patted Helmers’s face. “Jack? Wake up, Jack.” And when Helmers’s eyelids fluttered, and he mumbled, “What? What? What’s wrong?” Dave realized he’d been holding his breath. He’d been as alarmed as he could remember ever being in an often alarming lifetime. “Dave?” Helmers frowned. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I brought some lunch.” Helmers’s glasses lay under the table. Dave reached for them, handed them to him. “From Max Romano’s. I wanted to talk to you. What’s going on?”

Helmers grunted, struggling to sit up. The dog was all over him. “Would you get away, please!” he roared. “Give a man a chance, Duffy.” Duffy backed off. Dave set the chair straight and helped heavy old Helmers to his feet. “What’s going on”—the writer dropped onto the chair, wiped a hand down over his face—“is inspectors from the God damn fire department came up here yesterday about sunset and said they’d got a report this house was a fire hazard and made me let them in.” He picked up the mug, slurped at the coffee, lit a cigarette. “Claimed they never saw anything to equal it, gave me exactly twenty-four hours to clean it up or pay a fine. You know how they are about fires up in this canyon.”

“I know how the fires are,” Dave said. “So do you.”

“So I didn’t even eat supper. I worked till I dropped. Midnight, maybe later. And I was up at sunrise, no breakfast, right back at it again.” He looked at the old rectangular Hamilton on his thick wrist. “I was taking a coffee break, is all. Guess I fell asleep, didn’t I?”

“You shouldn’t have tried to do it yourself,” Dave said. “You should have hired help.”

“Nobody rents out elephants up here,” Helmers said. “No, I didn’t want strangers coming in, seeing how I’ve neglected Katherine’s house.”

“They didn’t know her,” Dave said. “They wouldn’t care.”

“She’d never forgive me.”

“All she ever wanted was for you to do your writing. And you sure as hell haven’t neglected that, have you?”

Helmers grunted. “Self-indulgence.” He turned on the chair, which creaked. He raised his head, sniffed the air. “Did you say lunch? Something smells absolutely glorious.”

Dave eyed him. “You sure you’re all right? You don’t want me to drive you to U.C.L.A. Medical Center?”

“Hell, no—thank you.” Helmers stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, pushed to his feet, and began to open the boxes. “I’m not sick, I just worked too hard and forgot to eat. I’m starved.” He lifted plates out of the boxes and set them on the table. He shook his fingers. “Still hot,” he said. “Sit down, sit down.” He rattled forks from a drawer, plates from a shelf, dusted the plates with his shirtsleeve, and clacked them down on the grubby table. He sat again, stubbed out the cigarette in a full ashtray, then began pulling the foil wrappers off the plates from Max’s. His eyes lit up. “Linguine with clams?” He bent to the second plate, inhaling deeply through his nose, the lenses of his glasses steaming up. “What’s this?”