Country of Old Men (17 page)

“And so you bought a gun,” Dave said. “A thirty-two caliber revolver—isn’t that right?”

Klein paled. He stared. He worked his mouth but no words came. He gulped from his mug and the coffee went down the wrong way. He had a coughing fit. Gasping, he finally said, “No. What gave you such an idea?” He slid out of the breakfast nook to find a box of tissues on a counter, and dry his eyes. He put the glasses back on and sat at the table again. “A gun? I have a horror of guns.”

“So have I,” Dave said. “But I own one.”

Klein gave a couple of small residual coughs, drank again, and said, “What made you think such a thing?”

“After they’ve been held up,” Dave said, “shopkeepers often decide to buy guns.”

“Someone said, ‘Buy a dog.
Schvartzahs
are deathly afraid of dogs.’” Klein smiled wanly. “But so am I.”

Dave tried the coffee. It was unspeakable. “Have you heard the good news?” he said. “The district attorney has dropped the murder charge against Rachel.”

“Ah.” Klein’s face lit up. “That’s wonderful. Of course, I knew she would never do such a thing, but what others would do—police and law courts—who can say? It would not be the first time an innocent—” He tilted his head, warily. “Why? Why did they drop the murder charge?”

“Because the gun she had wasn’t the one that killed Shales,” Dave said. Klein said nothing, he simply stared. “When Jordan Vickers telephoned Rachel at her workplace to warn her Shales was out of prison and in Los Angeles, she left the record company right away, and went into hiding at Karen Goddard’s apartment—a town house near the marina. Later, she remembered that Shales had left his gun hidden at her apartment before he went to jail. She was afraid if he got it again, he’d use it on her, or on Vickers, or Karen. So in the middle of the night, when Karen was asleep, Rachel drove to West L.A. to try to get the gun before he could get it. And you know what happened after that.”

“The police told me,” Klein said. “The television.”

“Not the whole story, though, did they?” Dave said. “You know more about it than they do.”

“I? I?” Klein sat back sharply, laid a hand on his chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Telephone company records,” Dave said, “show that Karen Goddard telephoned you that night at seventeen minutes past eleven.” Klein grew red in the face, and started to deny it, and Dave held up a hand. “Don’t tell me you were in the garage sorting books and didn’t hear the phone ring. You took the call. It lasted almost four minutes.”

Klein seemed to shrink in his place. At last, he raised his brows, blew out air, opened his hands. “What can I say? She called. She was frantic that Rachel would go there and run into Cricket. She said she’d been trying to reach Vickers but no one answered. She begged me to go head Rachel off, protect her, do whatever I could.”

“And she’s your daughter, and no matter how she’s hurt you, you love her. So you went. And took your gun along.”

“I’m an old man,” Klein said. “Cricket Shales is not the Incredible Hulk, but he’s young and strong. Yes, I took the gun—what did you expect?”

“That’s what I expected.” Dave smiled and slid out of the booth. “You want to show it to me, please?”

“What?” Klein goggled up at him. “Why, no, that is—”

“You haven’t got it—is that what you’re saying?”

“I haven’t got it.” He stared at his hands. His voice was small. “I’m no Rambo. It was dark in those patios. I took out the gun and tiptoed toward Rachel’s apartment. I was trembling, I was sure Cricket would jump out at me at any minute. Instead”—he laughed dolefully—“someone crept up behind me, put an arm around my throat, and choked me till I lost consciousness. When I woke I was lying on my face on cement and the gun was gone. All I could think of was Rachel. I started for her door, and here was Cricket lying dead. I heard sirens. The police were coming. I was sure it was my gun that had shot him. I was afraid they’d arrest me. I ran—past the swimming pool and out the back.”

Something was going to have to be done. When Dave pulled open the heavy front door of Max Romano’s to usher Jeff Leppard inside, eleven people stood waiting to be seated, and all the tables were occupied. The small dark bar was crowded, too—and some of the drinkers would be wanting lunch as well.

“Business,” he grunted to Leppard, as they edged their way through the hopeful, “is getting too damn good.”

He led the way to his table in its far shadowy corner under a stained-glass window and felt guilty about it. Was he going to have to give up the privilege of always having his own table, which he’d bought the place to keep? Not that the table was the whole story. He’d bought Max’s to hang on to a thousand memories. And to keep the present from vanishing into the past. The place was filled with the ghosts of people he’d loved and lost. Until he joined them in oblivion, he wanted to keep remembering them here.

“You could refuse service to coloreds,” Leppard said.

“Or Scandinavians,” Dave said.

When Leppard’s white wine and Dave’s Dos Equis had come, Leppard said, “We checked out what you said on the phone. It’s a Colt, registered in 1976 to a Herschel Klein, all right. Irwin’s brother. Kosher butcher. When he died in 1981, the widow didn’t know what to do with it, so she kept it. When Irwin told her about the robbery, she said, ‘Take it, the police won’t protect you, protect yourself.’”

“And he took it”—Dave lit a cigarette—“and now he wishes he hadn’t.”

“That sounded like a combat move,” Leppard said, “the arm around the throat from behind.”

“Is Len Gruber a veteran?” Dave said.

“No record of it,” Leppard said. “But we’ve been assembling another kind of record from around the country.”

“Brawling?” Dave took warm bread from a basket and buttered it. “Is that why he can’t hold a job? ‘Around the country’? Is that why he has to keep moving on?”

“You got it,” Leppard said. “He was here in L.A. almost five years, because it’s big, but mostly because they liked Tessa at Shadows.” Leppard nibbled his salad. “After what he did to Zach this time, I hope we find the son of a bitch.”

“I hope you find Irwin Klein’s gun in his glove compartment,” Dave said, “but I doubt it. Unless you can also find there a better motive for him to kill Cricket than jealousy.”

“Same as Jordan Vickers’s,” Leppard said. “Motive is not something we’ve really got much of in this case.”

Dave blinked at him. “Not so far. None of it seems to me to add up. Who really cared enough whether Cricket Shales lived or died to take the risk of killing him?”

Leppard smiled sourly. “Not much of a risk to date,” he said. “We’re a long way from catching them, whoever they are. I really liked Karen Goddard for it. But you ruined that with your telephone company research.” He looked at Dave sharply. “Just how did you manage that?”

“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have—”

“Spare me how cold it was living in those caves.”

“—you’ll understand there’s nothing secret in this world as long as one living person knows it.”

“We have access to those records,” Leppard said. “No one else except the subscriber himself is supposed to.”

Dave said, “Only you didn’t get around to using your legal right, and I did get around to using my shady one.”

“And we lose Karen Goddard as a suspect.” Leppard hungrily watched the waiter set down a tray on its folding stand and lay plates on the table, murmuring cautions about how hot they were.

“But we gain a line on the missing gun,” Dave said. “Not on where it is, or on who used it—if anybody used it. We sure as hell didn’t find it at Tomorrow House.” Leppard inhaled steam from his lasagna and sighed with delight. “Damn shame. Vickers was at the apartment complex when Shales was killed.” Leppard picked up his fork and began to eat. “He could easily have put Klein’s lights out and commandeered his gun.”

“If any of that really happened. It could be a lie.” Dave laid open his sand dabs and lifted out the fragile skeletons. “Klein could have shot Cricket himself.”

“Vickers said the killer was in his thirties.”

“Vickers said a lot of things,” Dave said. “If it turns out Len Gruber has the gun, then he’s Plain Vanilla. And I take back my distrust of Vickers. If not—”

A big figure loomed at the table. Dave looked up. It was Cliff Callahan. His face was anguished. He gave Leppard a nod. “Lieutenant?” He sat down and said to Dave, “I’m sorry to intrude, but I’m in deep trouble.”

“About that whirlybird wedding?” Dave said.

“You’ve got it. Amanda isn’t speaking to me. She’s really boiled. And I didn’t do it, Dave. I swear.”

“Then how did the studio publicity department find out? You and Amanda, Cecil and I were the only people who knew, and it wasn’t me.”

“What about Cecil?” Callahan said. “He’s a reporter.”

Dave said, “He’d never violate a personal confidence.”

“No,” Callahan said sheepishly. “I didn’t think so.”

“I never saw your names linked in the paper, or on television. You didn’t go to Beverly Hills parties or charity balls together. But you did go out now and then, didn’t you—restaurants, theatres, movies? And you’re too big to hide behind a pair of dark glasses.”

“Sure, we went out, but not to celebrity places.”

“Anyplace a celebrity goes is a celebrity place,” Dave said. “Some free-lance reporter scented a romance, and began keeping an eye on the two of you. When you came breezing out of the Hall of Records, a quick word with the clerk would have been all they needed.”

Callahan’s bulky muscles relaxed a little. He ventured a hopeful smile. “Will you please tell that to Amanda?”

“If you’re going to be married,” Dave said, “it seems to me she ought to learn to take your word for these things.”

“We’re still new to each other,” Callahan said. “I don’t blame her for not wanting to make a clown act out of her wedding—our wedding. I just wish she’d stop thinking because I’m an actor I’d trash her feelings just to satisfy my stupid ego. It’s not true, damn it.”

“She worries about making a mistake,” Dave said. “She’s almost done that more than once. Don’t take it personally.”

“You’ll talk to her?” Callahan was urgent.

“I’ll talk to her,” Dave said. “Now have some lunch.”

“Thanks, but”—Callahan rose, looking at his watch—“I’ve used up my time. Have to get back to work.” On his way out, people crowded around him, asking for autographs.

Watching, Leppard said, “If you don’t look out, this will turn into a celebrity place. Then how will you handle the crowds?”

H
E WOKE AT THREE-THIRTY
and showered, making the spray very hot in the hope of soaking out what remained of the ache in his joints. He put on worn jeans and an old cambric shirt, and crossed to the cookshack. The oven needed cleaning. He tied on a long red wraparound apron, and was squatting to get spray can, sponges, latex gloves from under the sink, when knuckles rattled the screen door. He stood up, squinting. He couldn’t make out whose shadow was cast by the westering sun on the screen.

“Samuels.” The pale detective came in. “We got word while Leppard was at lunch. Deputies in Contra Costa County saw a man stealing license plates off a pickup truck on a country road at five this morning. Guess who he was.”

“Len Gruber,” Dave said.

“He and Tessa are on their way from the airport now. The lieutenant figured you might like to come downtown.”

“Stealing license plates?”

“To put on his Toyota to throw the police forces of eleven western states and Canada into confusion.”

“The gun,” Dave said. “Did he have the gun?”

“They didn’t find one—not on him, not hidden in the car, not in their luggage. He says he never had a gun, so how could he throw it away? They questioned Tessa separately—no conflict.”

“Zach didn’t see any gun.” Glumly Dave shed the apron, laid it over a chair back. “I asked him at Madge Dunstan’s.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Samuels said. “We’ll zap Len for beating Zach up. And Tessa for not reporting him. And both of them for stranding their child on the coast road.”

“I sure as hell hope so.” A blue lightweight windbreaker hung by the door. He took it down and shrugged into it. “What about Klein?”

“There’s nothing to hold him on,” Samuels said. “Until we have brother Herschel’s revolver, we won’t know whether it was the one used on Shales, either, will we? While he was with Leppard at the department, I took a team and went over his place, house, garage, yard. We didn’t find any gun.”

They left the cookshack. Dave pulled the door shut. They headed for the road. “I’d say Klein probably had the best motive of anybody in this case. Shales had corrupted his only child, ruined her life, alienated her from her family.” Samuels opened the door of an unmarked city car for Dave, and he eased himself stiffly into the seat. “The man hated Shales, and here was a chance to get back at him. His attitude these days is that his life is over. Maybe he figured he had nothing to lose.” Samuels got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door. Dave asked, “Did your team find a flight jacket in his closet?”

“I didn’t ask them,” Samuels said.

“Ask them,” Dave said. “Just for me.”

Len Gruber didn’t look cocky anymore. He looked seedy and hopeless in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit. And as sore at fate as a man his age could look. A public defender sat beside him in the interrogation room, Ruben Goetz, a plump young man in a cheap gray lightweight suit. He had rigged fasteners for his attaché case from Velcro—someone had broken the brass latches. Leppard stood against the interrogation room wall again, in shirtsleeves again, arms folded across his sturdy chest again.

“You went out looking for Zach this last time,” he said. “When he crept out to try to find Toyland School by himself. Why didn’t you go looking for him the night of the shooting?”

“I told you,” Gruber said, “I was asleep, zonked.”

“That’s what you said,” Leppard agreed, “but maybe you were mistaken. Maybe you remembered it wrong. Maybe there was a commercial break in the TV show you were watching, and you got up to go to the bathroom, and you looked into his room and he wasn’t in his bed. Tessa would chew you out when she got home from work and he wasn’t there—so you went looking for him. What time did this happen?”