Country of Old Men (2 page)

“No problem.” Dave’s friend and mechanic Kevin Nakamura would do it. “We’ll have to stop and buy some small-boy clothes. Madge says all he’s wearing is a T-shirt and briefs, and they’re filthy. As he is.”

E
UCALYPTUS, PIN OAKS, MOUNTAIN
holly had grown up around Helmers’s place and hid it almost completely from the road. The writer swung the Jaguar into a rutted dirt driveway and halted it there with the engine running. Grunting with the effort, he got out of the car and stepped to a rural mailbox on which the red-painted name
HELMERS
had faded to a pink so faint it was hard to make out. The hinges of the mailbox door squeaked as he opened it. He pulled out a small carton and a few envelopes, shut the box, got stiffly back into the Jaguar again, and slammed the door. He patted the carton.

“My new book,” he said.

They jounced on up the driveway to the house, unpainted cedar, with decks and tall windows. Dave recollected when it was new and how proud Helmers had been of it then. He’d started life a poor kid—really poor. His father had lost his grain business in the Depression, Midwest somewhere, the Dust Bowl. In Pasadena the man, already past sixty, had found it difficult to find work. A slim, handsome kid, Jack during high school had always had to earn money at this odd job and that. Dave, whose father even then had a Midas touch, had wondered how Jack stood it. But he was always cheerful, always optimistic. He was going to be the best writer America ever saw. It was only a matter of time.

It hadn’t gotten quite that good. Twenty years of struggle lay ahead. But with Katherine always rooting for him, no matter how many novels and stories came winging back from New York rejected, he’d never stopped believing he’d make it some day. Dave liked Helmers, but as the years dragged on, it looked more and more certain to Dave that Helmers was one of life’s losers.

Then, suddenly, what had been bundles of wastepaper to editors before became publishable. And by the time he was forty, Helmers was earning a living from his books—not much of a living, but enough so he didn’t have to clerk in bookstores or type bills of lading in back offices at movie studios any longer. The books weren’t the great American novels he’d dreamed of writing when he was editor of the high school paper, and used to chatter excitedly to Dave about the future. They were detective novels.

But they were literate, reviewers found something elegant about them, and slowly they built him a readership. Sometimes, when he sent Dave a new book, he’d enclose a note. He was published all over Europe now, and in Japan, and his publishers kept the books in print here in the States. He built this house—he’d called it the house that Kenniston built because Kenniston was the detective hero of his books—on money he’d earned writing, and he was proud of that. Which maybe meant that he, too, had sometimes, along with Dave and other friends, doubted he’d ever manage it.

But now, as Dave got out of the Jaguar to go around and get into the driver’s seat, he saw that time and the weather and above all neglect had taken a toll on the house. The decks slumped. The windows were dusty and rain-streaked and hadn’t been washed, it looked like, for years. Inside them, curtains hung torn and discolored by rain that had got to them because somebody’d forgotten to close the windows. The varnish on the front door had cracked and half of it peeled off. Cats slept in the speckled sunlight on the deck among neglected plants in pots. Dogs barked when Helmers put his key in the lock.

“I know murder’s urgent business,” he called, “but come in for just a minute, will you?”

He pushed open the door, and a business card fluttered to the deck. Dave picked it up, handed it to him. Helmers grunted. “Goodman, again, real estate man. Told him I won’t sell. Nice young fellow, thoughtful, helpful, but he won’t take no for an answer.” The house smelled of cats. The floor was stacked with dusty newspapers. Bookcases overflowed. Magazines, catalogues, books, videotapes, records filled the chairs and sofa, avalanches of unopened mail. On the walls, pictures hung crooked. Spiderwebs connected handsome but dusty hand-thrown pots on the mantelpiece. The empty trays of TV dinners made a crooked stack on the television set. Dogs came through the clutter, tongues hanging, tails wagging—small brown dogs of no certain breed but cheerful, sniffing Dave’s pant legs, jumping up at Helmers, who patted them and spoke their names and told them to behave themselves.

“They never see strangers,” he said.

Katherine would have been more than upset to see the place. She’d have wept. She kept it spotless, glowing. Dave remembered that. She wasn’t any Craig’s wife. It was a house that put the visitor at ease. Casual. Comfortable. But cobwebs? Dust? Shredded upholstery? Lamps tipped over and not righted again? Coffee mugs and drinking glasses standing around, the dregs grown over with mold?

“Excuse the way the place looks,” Helmers said. He edged between the slumping stacks and sat in the one chair clear for anyone to sit in. “Anybody’d think I was a drunk. I’m not. I’m only drunk on one thing—writing. I get up in the morning, come downstairs and eat some cereal, go to the machine back yonder with a mug of coffee, write, eat supper, watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, start the whole routine over again. Hell, sometimes I don’t get out of my pajamas from one end of the week to the other. A day off? What’s a day off?” He poked around among papers on a table next to the chair, came up with scissors, slit the tape on the carton and pulled open the flaps. “I haven’t got time to clean house, and if I had time, my bad back and short wind wouldn’t let me.” He took out a book with a very shiny jacket, found a pen in the rubble, scrawled on the flyleaf, clapped the cover closed, and handed the book to Dave. “Now you’re right up to date,” he said.

“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, hysterical. 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.”