Country of Old Men (21 page)

“Why did he tell me he had no gift for music?”

“He told me that, too. It’s part of his new identity. The real estate broker. Wynn-Madden is out of business, Maestro. The real Arthur Madden died year before last.”

“The real—?” Chernov was pathetic in his bewilderment. “But, but—he came here because he had heard I was ill and wanted to put this building up for sale. He brought papers for me to sign. Imprinted Wynn-Madden.”

“You didn’t sign them, I hope,” Dave said.

“Not those, no, but I have signed many papers for Arthur. He is my heir, I have no one else. He has looked after me with great care, tended to my every need, he—”

“He’s an impostor, Maestro,” Dave said. The snapshot lay on the table. “Did you see who else is in that photo?”

Chernov gave a sick, sorry little nod. “Cricket.”

“That’s right. They were friends. Arthur didn’t come here by accident. After Rachel brought Cricket here to meet you that time, Cricket told him about you and your illness and all the beautiful priceless things in this apartment. He was struggling to stay alive in the music business. He hated struggling. He wanted to be rich.”

“But—I pay him nothing,” Chernov said.

“He manages your finances, doesn’t he? Writes the checks, banks your income—rents, dividends, royalties?”

Chernov looked down at his hands, clasped in his lap. “Such things are beyond me, now.”

“Then he can help himself to whatever he needs,” Dave said. “Isn’t that so? You trust him completely.”

Chernov’s head remained bowed. “Completely,” he whispered. Then, with a brief flare of indignation, he glared at Dave. “He has never betrayed my trust.”

“I hope not,” Dave said. He slid the pictures back into the envelope, and stood up. “But he’s been taking your paintings out to be appraised at auction houses. That explains why they’ve been disappearing and reappearing. He’s greedy. He wants to know how much you’re leaving behind, Maestro, when you die—down to the last penny.”

The sick man was terribly white. He didn’t speak. He simply stared miserably into Dave’s face.

“Where is his room?” Dave asked.

“It is the servant’s room, back of the kitchen,” Chaim Chernov said. “I tried to dissuade him. He might have had either extra bedroom. But no. He insisted.”

Dave figured he insisted because it was up two little steps—wheelchair proof. It was cold and anonymous, like its occupant. There wasn’t even a picture on the wall. He opened a closet. There among clean shirts, slacks, jackets, sweats, a business suit, hung the flight jacket. Shoes lay on the floor, loafers, brogues, Nikes. He picked up the Nikes. Stuck to the soles were long pine needles, brown, like those fallen into the empty swimming pool near Rachel Klein’s apartment. Crumpled in a corner of the closet lay a black sweater and jeans. He smiled. They were snowy with lint. He opened drawers. Underwear, socks, sweaters, and under them a .32 Colt revolver. He stared down at this for a minute, then left it where it was. He didn’t need more, but he suspected there was more, and he went into a small bathroom. On open shelves lay folded towels, washcloths, bath mats, on a wash basin a toothbrush, toothpaste, a throwaway razor. Cans of shave cream, deodorant, and hair spray stood side by side. The door of the medicine chest was a clean mirror clamped in chrome. He pulled it open. On glass shelves inside lay small clear plastic packets of crack, a glass pipe, and a Bic lighter. A voice said:

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Dave closed the cabinet and looked at Alan Marsh in the mirror. Hilda Vosper had gotten him just right. He had the gun from the drawer in his hand. Dave said to him, “It’s too late, Alan. You should have stuck to your keyboards.”

“You’ve got the Maestro very upset,” Marsh said.

“Better upset than dead,” Dave said.

“What do you mean?”

Dave said, “The man pointing his gun at your back will explain it to you. I’m tired of explaining.” The man was Jeff Leppard. Behind him, Joey Samuels held handcuffs. “You got my message,” Dave told them. “That’s nice.”

It turned into a long day. He had a kind of grudging affection for Parker Center, the jangling telephones, the rattling keyboards, flickering, beeping terminals, the constant movement of cops in and out, the wails of sirens on the streets below, prisoners, witnesses, lawyers coming and going, arguments, laughter, emotions running high and low like fevers. But by the time he felt free to leave today, he’d grown weary of it. Maybe even nauseated by it. He climbed aching into the Jaguar and put the new tall glass towers of L.A. at his back gratefully, heading out the freeway for Laurel Canyon and home. He hauled himself up to the loft, rid himself of his clothes, laid his aching bones on the bed. He didn’t look at the clock. He didn’t care how late in the day it was. If Cecil came home and found the way he slept scary, it couldn’t be helped. He had to rest. He woke at some point in the night when the bed moved. Cecil sat on the far side, pulling a shirt off over his head.

“Hello,” Dave said to his lean glossy back.

“So it was this Alan Marsh, was it? Plain Vanilla?”

“I told you on the phone,” Dave said.

Cecil lay beside him, propped on an arm, looking down in the starlit darkness. “All about the flight jacket, the shoes, the lint, and how Len Gruber identified him.”

“I also told you about the gun.”

“The lab tests weren’t in yet.”

Dave turned onto his side, and his eyes fell shut. “It was the same gun that killed Cricket. No question.”

“Mr. Klein’s gun? And Marsh took it from him?”

Dave sighed and murmured, “Marsh picked Cricket up at the airport in the maestro’s car, drove him to his parole officer, then to a cheap motel. Cricket said he’d pick up some crack and they could meet that evening and smoke it. Marsh went, and Cricket told him the plan he’d thought up in prison—to kill Chaim Chernov and make it look like a break-in and robbery.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Cecil said. “Cricket would do the killing while Marsh was out someplace public, establishing an alibi—and afterward, they’d split Chernov’s estate between them.”

“The paintings alone are worth millions.”

“So what went wrong?” Cecil said.

“Marsh claims he was revolted by the plan,” Dave said drowsily. “He loves the maestro. My God, did he give him two years of tender loving care just to end up killing him?”

“But the truth is, he didn’t want to split the profits with Cricket, right?”

“You’ve grown cynical living with me,” Dave mumbled. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

“But all the same, Marsh drove Cricket to Rachel’s to pick up the gun he planned to use to kill Chernov, and Marsh waited outside, fretting. When, as luck and Karen Goddard would have it, along came little Mr. Klein with his gun. And Marsh jumped him from behind, took it from him, and shot Cricket when he came out of Rachel’s place?”

Dave was drifting. “Marsh was infirm of purpose, and Cricket almost got away from him.”

“His purpose firmed up later,” Cecil said glumly.

“Worse luck for Jordan Vickers,” Dave said, and fell asleep.

He woke early. His stomach did it to him. He hadn’t put anything in it since breakfast time yesterday. He crept out of bed in the gray dawn light, picked up clothes, and went softly down to the bathroom to shower, shave, and dress. Then he crossed to the cookshack to start coffee and heat some croissants as quickly as he could. He was taking butter out of the icebox when the phone rang. He didn’t want it to waken Cecil, so he ran for it. The sudden haste made his heart hammer. He grabbed the receiver. The voice at the other end belonged to Jack Helmers.

“Dave? I’ve been robbed. Can you get up here?”

Dave groaned. “Call the police, Jack.”

“I don’t want strangers. I want you.”

Helmers said, “Look at the mess he made.” He’d brought Dave through the living room that looked forlornly empty without its heaps of newspapers, magazines, junk mail, junk in general, to the door of his workroom. Inside, green words glowed on the computer monitor in a corner by a window, the cursor light blinking. But the stacks of manuscripts and magazines and books and clippings were all over the place. “Threw stuff around like a maniac.”

“Too bad,” Dave said. “I’d recommended this room for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

“Not funny,” Helmers said. He wore another cotton flannel shirt. This one had been washed and the dryer had shrunk it. It had popped a button over his big belly and showed a gap of T-shirt underneath. “I’m working,” he complained. “I can’t afford these interruptions.”

“What time was this?”

“Don’t know. Asleep upstairs. Didn’t hear a thing.”

“What about the dogs?” Dave stepped into the room.

“Wish I knew. They’re not watchdogs, they love everybody. Been driving all over the neighborhood, calling them. No luck. That worries me more than what he stole.”

Dave crouched and began picking up stacks of pages. His heart began to labor. “Which was?”

“Can’t you guess? The Pasadena novel, the big one. And I mean, he took everything, disks, notes, drafts, and four copies of the final manuscript.”

“And nothing else?” Winded, Dave straightened with his paper burden and looked around for a place to set it down.

Helmers took it from him, gave it a glance, grunted, and perched it on top of a storage cabinet. “That was it.”

“But doesn’t your agent have copies?” Dave said.

Helmers shook his head. “I got sore when everybody kept batting it back.” He scowled to himself. “Never been so humiliated. Been writing novels for twenty-five years. Now, suddenly, I don’t know how.”

“Jack, your new book’s getting great reviews.”

“The mystery,” Helmers snorted. “I can write those in my sleep. This book meant something, God damn it.”

“They all mean something,” Dave said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Oh, I have. But it took a while.” He left the room, making for the kitchen. “And at the time, I got on the phone and called in every copy from wherever it was, New York, London, Tokyo, all over. The way everybody was sneering at it, I didn’t want a trace of that book left anyplace on earth. I wanted to bury it. Come on, coffee’s ready.”

“You overreacted.” Dave’s jaw began to ache. That was novel. What did it mean? Probably nothing. He went along. The kitchen looked dismal without its empty cans, frozen-dinner trays, bottles—stripped, soiled, lifeless. But the smell of brewing coffee was welcoming. He found butter and English muffins in the grubby refrigerator. “It wasn’t you. You said it.” Now he began hurting between his shoulder blades. “The book publishing business is changing.”

“It’s the damn buyouts.” Helmers filled mugs with coffee. “Nobody cares about the product anymore. They fire everyone who’s built the business, and put in kids with milk on their chins to run things, and”—he thumped the mugs on the unwashed table—“suddenly writers like me are nobody. If you can’t please half a million readers, forget it.”

An ache started in Dave’s left arm. He rubbed the arm while he watched the toaster. It was old and scorched and he didn’t trust it. He kept flipping the lever to check on the muffins. After three checks, they were nicely tanned, and he laid pats of butter on them to melt. He found a lone salad plate in a cupboard, wiped the dust off, put the muffins on it, and set it on the table. “Jam?”

“Probably all moldy. Honey be all right?” Helmers fetched a tin bucket from the icebox, clunked it on the table, thumbed off its lid. “Neighbor used to bring us a couple of these every year. Best honey I ever tasted.” He spooned some on his muffin, bit into it, chewed. “Place look better to you cleaned out? Goodman’s coming in to paint it next weekend.” He took another bite, and went on with his mouth full. “Good kid. He’s offered me a deal, too, and I’m taking him up on it. He buys the house now, lets me live in it rent-free till I die, then it’s his.”

“Don’t trust him,” Dave said.

Dogs began a commotion outside, barking, scratching at the screen door. “Great God,” Helmers said, jumping up, bumbling out of the room. “Duffy, Molly, is that you?”

Dave followed him to the front door. A limousine was sliding out of the driveway. Helmers banged out through the screen door and crouched, hugging and crooning to the dogs, who licked his face and whined. “Where have you been?”

“Dognapped,” Dave said. “And see what else has been returned.” A carton stood at the foot of the stairs. He fetched it, climbed back with it, legs weak, short of breath, set it on the rail and pulled open the flaps. Floppy disks. Manuscripts. “Could this be your Pasadena book?”

“You’re kidding.” Helmers struggled to his feet, the dogs still jumping around him, excited, happy. He peered into the carton. “By God, it is.” He shielded his eyes against the sun and looked down the driveway. “Did you see who brought it?”

“I saw the car,” Dave said. “Morse Campbell’s.”

“I hoped it was,” Helmers said. “Dumb bastard.” He laughed. “All that worry, all that trouble, having me watched, trying to bribe me, finally resorting to breaking and entering”—he wiped away tears of mirth from his stubbly face—“and all for nothing.”

Dave stared at him. “For nothing?”

Helmers clapped Dave’s shoulder, grinning. “There isn’t a word about him in it—there’s not a word about any of you.”

“But you let me think—”

“Mostly, it’s about me and my father.”

“Hell,” Dave said, “I wanted to be immortal.”

“Sorry about that,” Helmers said, “but once I heard how worried everyone was, I had to go on with the joke. I meant to go on with it till the book was published—if it ever is.”

“It livened things up.” Dave rubbed his aching arm.

“I’m just sorry I couldn’t see Morse’s pop-eyed face when he read it.” Chuckling, wagging his head, Helmers picked up the carton and carried it back into his sad house, Duffy and Molly jumping joyfully around him.

Dave turned to follow, and pain laid a red-hot iron bar across his chest. He grabbed for the deck rail. “Jack,” he said. It came out faint. He tried again. “Jack?” Then he wasn’t standing anymore. He was on hands and knees.

Helmers appeared in the doorway. “Jesus, what is it?”