Country of Old Men (19 page)

Dave put a hand over his mouth. “Listen a minute. You’ve been following this woman, haven’t you?” He nodded to indicate Amanda, who stood by the fireplace watching in bewilderment. “Well, I will tell that to the
guardi
, and the
guardi
won’t like it. You mustn’t do that.”

The youth knocked Dave’s hand away. “I am photographer.” He was panting. He rummaged in the bag. “Here, see? My press credentials.” He waved a creased paper at Dave.

“Good for you. But harassment isn’t covered by this.”

“I’m-a no harass,” the youth said, glaring at Amanda. “She is VIP. Newsworthy. The public—”

“Has a right to know?” Cecil looked irony at Dave and went along the room to get himself a drink. “Forget it.”

Dave said, “You’ve been taking her picture for days now. Isn’t that so?”

The boy nodded. “Yes. Why do you object?” He threw Amanda an impudent grin. “She ’as no object.”

“She didn’t know,” Dave said. “I knew.”

The boy looked him up and down. “You? I ’ave never seen you before. ’oo are you?”

“I’m the lady’s relative,” Dave said. “And I knew you existed without having to see you. Somebody was telling the studio that makes ‘Icarus’ all about the lady and Cliff Callahan. It was you, wasn’t it?”

The youth shrugged. “I am professional photographer. They buy my pictures. It is ’ow I live.”

“And one of those pictures showed the lady and Cliff Callahan at the Hall of Records downtown, isn’t that right?”

“You are charlatan,” the youth scoffed.

“You are wrong. I’m a real magician,” Dave said. “Else how did I know you’d turn up here tonight? How did I know to have my friend ready to catch you?”

“This is craziness.” The youth turned and reached for the door. Dave stepped in front of him.

“Just one more minute. Tell me if you took such a picture. What harm can it do?”

The youth eyed him narrowly. “If it can do no ’arm, why are you so excite’ about it?”

Cecil came back. “Because it can do some good,” he said. “There’s been a misunderstanding between the young lady and her fiancé. You don’t want to wreck their love story, do you? I thought Italians were romantic.”

The boy sneered. “You tap dance, I play mandolino.”

Cecil raised a fist in mock threat and grinned.

The youth grinned back. “Sure, I take that picture.”

“And went inside and showed the clerk your press card and asked if the lady and Mr. Callahan had taken out a marriage license, right?”

He shrugged. “I already knew they take blood test.”

Amanda gasped. “What? But doctors’ records—”

“Are sacred?” Dave said, and looked at the youth. “Is nothing sacred?”

“Nothing you can buy for twenty dollars,” the boy said, snatched open the door, and fled into the night.

He left them laughing for a long time.

P
OLICE PATROL CARS STOOD
at angles in the street, doors hanging open, lights revolving on their tops, pointless in the early morning sunlight. Dave left the Jaguar at the curb down the street and jogged toward the shingled turrets of Tomorrow House. A black-and-white and an unmarked police car stood in the driveway. Radios crackled from the cars, static jolts interrupted by the voices of female dispatchers. Only two officers were there to hear. Uniformed. They stood by one of the cars, talking, a black, an Asian. Dave showed them his license. Nice-looking kids. Dave wondered when they’d left high school—last week?

He told them, “Lieutenant Leppard sent for me.” They peered at the license. The black one said, “That’s right. Go on in, Mr. Brandstetter.”

The front door stood open, but the gap-toothed girl in coveralls was nowhere to be seen. Nor was anyone else. The television in the big room to the right of the hall played cartoons but no one was there to watch. The metal folding chairs in the other room were empty. A uniform looked at Dave from the end of the hallway beside the staircase. Dave showed him his license and said his piece again, and was waved on. He had a feeling he’d end up on the back porch, and he ended up on the back porch. It was milling with men, but the center of attraction lay dead under a linty brown bullet-punctured blanket on his monkish cot. Jordan Vickers. He was having his picture taken. Cameras flashed.

Leppard appeared beside Dave. “I want you to look at it.” He pushed men aside, taking Dave to the body.

“He was reaching for the phone,” Dave said.

“Looks like it,” Leppard said.

Dave stood looking at bed, body, bedside table, lamp, telephone, clock radio, screened window above the bed. Vickers’s thrift-shop clothes lay over a chair, wallet, loose change, keys. Dave crouched and peered under the bed. Big shoes. The cap with
Boss
on it. He pushed painfully to his feet, dug out his reading glasses, bent close to the blanket. It smelled of that same cologne he’d breathed the other morning in the interrogation room. He studied the blanket, straightened, tucked the glasses into his jacket pocket.

“Shot at close range,” he said to Leppard, “by what I’d guess was a thirty-two.”

“Three shots, just like Shales,” Leppard said.

“Only this time, he used a pillow for a silencer,” Dave said. He looked around him. “Anybody find that pillow?”

“No sign of it,” Leppard said. “Some more of that lint outside. He must have taken it with him.”

Dave moved between men to the outside door. The screen had been cut, a hand thrust in to work the hook. “For a man with so many chancy acquaintances, he put up a poor defense.”

“Door says it wasn’t one of the inmates,” Leppard said.

“Door to the hallway locked, was it?”

“No. They tell me never.”

Dave gave his head a marveling shake. He glanced toward the desk and files. “Nothing there?”

“Fingerprints will tell us. I doubt it. He came for only one thing—to kill the man that saw him shoot Shales.”

Dave grunted. “One of them. When did it happen?”

“The M.E. will tell us.”

Leppard nodded at a bony man with gray skin, a slack mouth, long teeth—Carlyle, who shambled to the bed with his kit, giving Dave a sour smile as he passed. He hated being kept waiting. He glanced around him as if he couldn’t quite believe his turn had come. Then he uncovered the long lean body on the cot. Jordan had slept naked. Dave turned away.

“Nobody heard the shots?”

Leppard led the way into the hall. “Nobody will admit they heard the shots, heard anybody prowling around, heard squat. And maybe they didn’t, but they’re not types who like talking to the police. They’re types who figure whatever they say, they’ll end up in trouble.”

“Where are they?” Dave said, and walked into the empty rap session room. “The place is usually teeming.”

“They were all packing to leave,” Leppard said. “I ordered them to stay.” He glanced up the stairs. “In their rooms, I hope.” A uniformed officer appeared at the top of the stairs. Another high school type. This one blond and blue-eyed. Leppard called, “Everybody still here?”

“Detective Samuels isn’t through talking to them yet,” the blond boy said. “They’re all still here. But they don’t like it. They don’t call me by my right name.”

Dave lit a cigarette. “What’s his line of questioning?”

“He’s after gossip.” Leppard held out his hand. “You have one of those you can spare?”

Dave’s eyebrows went up. “You, Lieutenant?”

“Never mind that,” Leppard said, took the pack from Dave’s hand, got a cigarette from it, set it in his mouth. “This is a crazy case with no end to it.” Dave lit the cigarette for him. “He’s trying to find out if anybody was sore at Vickers. Nursing a grudge. Whatever.”

“We know who did this,” Dave told him.

Leppard blew smoke away and snorted. “Plain Vanilla?”

Dave said, “Plain Vanilla.”

“Businesslike bastard.” Leppard flicked ashes into the empty fireplace. “Gruber’s lucky to be in jail.”

“But Rachel Klein is out of jail,” Dave said. “I hate to give unwanted advice again—”

“Here it comes,” Leppard said bitterly. “‘I told you so.’ You warned me to protect Vickers and I brushed you off. Never again. I’ve already sent people to watch out for her.”

“She back at her apartment?” Dave said.

“You want to tell your TV buddy? You think that will draw the killer, and my men can bust him when he shows up?”

Dave shrugged. “He sure as hell watches the news.”

“Plain Vanilla.” Shaking his head in disgust, Leppard moved into the hall. “‘Looks like anybody,’ Gruber said.”

Dave followed him. “Well, we know now that Vickers saw Shales’s killer, all right, poor bastard. So did Gruber. And it wasn’t Rachel, it wasn’t Karen Goddard, it wasn’t Irwin Klein. Who does that leave?”

“A drug dealer,” Leppard said. “Who works the area around that apartment complex. The first idea is sometimes the best, right?”

Dave said, “Tessa Gruber said drug-related shootings were common around there. Have you checked them out? Maybe this isn’t Plain Vanilla’s first.”

“Hell, yes, we checked them out.” Leppard glared at Dave and tossed his cigarette off the porch into a flower bed. “No loose ends in any of those.”

“Loose ends enough in this one,” Dave said. “Which reminds me—there’s something I forgot to do.”

“What’s that?” Leppard said.

“Look at Cricket Shales’s personal effects.”

“Help yourself,” Leppard said. “There’s nothing there.”

A uniformed officer, this one no kid, a veteran with a beer belly, on the verge of retirement, looked at Dave through the black-wire mesh of the property department with eyes that had seen too much of the wrong kind of life. Dave remembered him but not well. Siekmeier was the name on the plastic-enclosed identification tag on his shirt pocket. He said, “Brandstetter, isn’t it? Been a long time.”

Dave smiled a little. “I hear that a lot, lately.”

Siekmeier chuckled. “Yeah, me, too.” With a wince and a soft groan he slid his weight off a stool. “What can I do you for?”

“Shales,” Dave said, “Howard Ronald, also known as Cricket. Homicide victim. His worldly goods?”

“Yeah.” Siekmeier went to a steel mesh gate, rattled keys, swung the gate open. “Come in.” Dave did that, and Siekmeier closed the gate again and led him down aisles of green steel shelving piled with cardboard cartons. He peered left and right as he went, then grunted, stopped, hauled down a carton. He nodded. “Table down there.”

“Thank you.” Dave carried the carton to the table that was also of green steel. He set it down and pulled up the flaps. Wristwatch, wallet, jeans, jockey shorts, T-shirts, a cheap fleece-lined jacket, tennis shoes. Music paper, much of it written on. Well-worn paperback books, all of them about pop singers, jazz artists, rock groups. A meager sheaf of letters. He took a rubber band off this, put on his reading glasses, sat on a stool to scan the letters. Five were from Rachel Klein. Eight were signed Alan. Rachel’s were pleas for forgiveness and preachments against drugs. Alan’s were mostly happy memories of the music business. Dave wished Shales had kept the envelopes. It would be nice to know Alan’s last name and his address on Easy Street. Cricket had evidently put him there, and he was grateful. Anything he could do for Cricket when he got out of prison, all Cricket had to do was ask.

When Dave unfolded the last letter, a snapshot fell out and fluttered to the floor. He laid down the letter, got off the stool, bent painfully and retrieved the snapshot. He sat on the stool and studied it, frowning. It showed three slim young men, long-haired, one with an electric guitar, one with a Fender bass, one boxed in by keyboards. They were grouped on an outdoor stage cluttered with microphones. Part of a banner in the background had gotten into the photograph. It said
Estival.
The guitarist must be Cricket. The bass player was dark, with sunglasses, something feminine about him. The keyboard man had stood up, smiling, and raised his right hand in a wave. He wore a beard. Dave turned the photo over.
Alan Marsh, Brice Tyner, Cricket Shales. August 1985.
What might be a town name came next, but the ink had gotten wet and it was unreadable. So were three words in a sentence that ended
forget this? Wasn’t it the greatest?

Dave looked along the aisle. Siekmeier sat on his stool at the counter, his broad back turned. Dave slipped the photo into his jacket pocket, loaded the carton again, and returned it to the shelf from which Siekmeier had taken it down. He went along to the gate. “Thanks, Siekmeier,” he said. “Leppard said there was nothing there, but one man’s nothing can be another man’s something. I had to look.”

“Anytime.” Siekmeier got off his stool again and opened the gate so Dave could go out. “Be seeing you.”

“Of course,” Dave said. “We’re always bumping into each other, aren’t we?”

“Like clockwork,” Siekmeier said. “Every twenty years.”

The woman at the musicians’ union in Hollywood had flame-colored hair and lipstick and immense flame-colored frames to her glasses, but she had no record of any Alan Marsh in her computer file. No, he hadn’t transferred to another city or state—there’d be a record of that. Musicians travel all the time. The locals had to have records of everybody. No—plainly Alan Marsh had dropped out of the music business.

“It happens. Lots of them fall by the wayside after a while. You can love music, but a person has to eat.”

Cricket Shales’s name was still on the rolls. He had evidently paid his dues, San Quentin or no San Quentin.

“You can take him off, now,” Dave said.

“Oh—why is that?”

“He died,” Dave said. “Just a few days ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” She used flame-colored fingernails to nip a dead nasturtium from the arrangement on her desk. “The birthdate on his membership card makes him only thirty. What happened—AIDS?”

“It could have been,” Dave said. “He used needles. But it wasn’t. It was murder.”

She gave a gasp and her eyes opened wide.

Dave said, “The police have run out of leads. Marsh and a bassist called Brice Tyner used to play with him. I hoped they might give me an idea of who would want him dead.”

“Really?” She picked up and studied Dave’s business card again. “Well, I can’t give you Brice Tyner’s address, but there’s no rule against your seeing his agent.” She rattled fingers on her keyboard, studied the screen, scribbled on a note pad, tore off the slip, handed it to Dave. Above her note it read
From the desk of Renata Schwartz,
and beneath,
Have A Nice Day.
“That’s the address,” she said.