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Authors: Joseph Hansen

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BOOK: Country of Old Men
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“Who said it was a guy?” Leppard asked.

“Oh, Christ.” Gruber made a face. “All right. The woman, then. Whoever it is, they’re dead, right?”

Leppard nodded. “Cricket Shales. You know him?”

Gruber slumped quickly back in the chair again. “No.” Without looking at Leppard, he stretched out a hand to him. “Now, can I have my remote back, officer, please, sir?”

“What’s wrong with you, Gruber? Your son was kidnapped. Where’s your humanity? You didn’t even report him missing.”

Gruber blinked at him. “He’s back. He’s okay. What do you want from me?”

Dave said, “That bruise on his face doesn’t worry you?”

Gruber shrugged. “Dame probably hit him. He can get on your nerves.”

“Hit him yourself, sometimes, do you?” Dave said.

Gruber glanced at him. “You got any kids?”

“No,” Dave said.

“I didn’t think so,” Gruber said, “or you wouldn’t ask.”

Leppard said, “Where’d he go now?” and left the room.

“How the hell do I know?” Gruber got up, stepped to the television set, and switched it on. On the tube, a dog in the back of a parked pickup truck was looking longingly into the bed of the red pickup truck parked next to it. At last, the dog hopped from his truck into the new one. Of a different brand, of course. Dave wondered if the message was “Let your dog choose your next truck.” Voices reached him.

Tessa Gruber yelped, “Where are you taking him?”

“Downtown,” Leppard answered, “to police headquarters.”

“You can’t,” she said. “Zach, come here.”

Zach didn’t do that. He came into the living room, hanging onto Leppard’s hand. She came after them. She’d put on a black cocktail waitress’s outfit, very short skirt, net stockings. She had good legs. She shrilled at Gruber, “You going to let them do this?”

“I guess they want a medic to check him out.” Gruber stared at the television set. “See if he’s okay. They do that after kidnappings.” He took up his beer can and gulped from it. “It’s routine, Tessa. You’d know stuff like that if you ever watched the news.”

“Well, you go with them,” she said.

“Come on,” he protested. “What for?”

“Because I can’t go, stupid. I gotta get to work.”

Leppard passed the remote back to Gruber and went with Zach by the hand to the front door. “He’ll be all right.” Dave opened the door and stepped onto the gallery. Leppard did this, too, then turned back to say, “But don’t take any trips, Mr. Gruber, please. We may want to talk to you later.” He started off along the gallery. “Get off my case,” Gruber said. “I got enough trouble.”

“Wait.” Tessa trotted after them. “How long you going to keep him? When’ll you bring him back?”

“Do you really give a damn?” Leppard said.

“What? I looked for him all day. I told you.”

“Maybe, but you didn’t report him missing,” Leppard said. “The juvenile authorities are going to hold that against you.” He sighed regretfully and, wagging his round, sleek head, he started off again, making for the stairs. “They may not ever let me bring him back.”

She didn’t grab for Zach, go for Leppard with her nails, or wail, or curse. She just stood and watched them go. When Dave halted on the far side of the patio below, and looked back, she was still up there in her sleazy, sexy costume, gazing at them mutely and without expression.

He said to Leppard, “Bible student, are you?”

Leppard chuckled and led Zach toward the street. “You talking about King Solomon?”

“He somehow leaps to mind,” Dave said.

4

T
HE TOYLAND SCHOOL WAS
on Venice near La Cienega—flat-roofed, pale green stucco buildings, construction-paper daffodils Cellotaped inside the windows. Outside in a gravel play yard stood a short chute, swings, a jungle gym to climb on, a steel barrel to crawl through, a little train with two cars behind it on a circle of track, all these things painted bright red, blue, yellow, green. A high chain-link fence enclosed the yard. The latch on the gate was up out of the reach of small fry. And when Dave walked up to it, a young Asian woman in jeans, a blouse, a cardigan, was standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms to put a padlock in the latch.

He asked, “May I help?”

She was startled for a second. It wasn’t a spot where you’d expect passersby on foot. The sidewalk never got used. Here in front of the school it was swept—but along Venice in both directions nobody had paid any attention to it for some time. Warehouses, an auto repair shop, a screen-door maker, a sign painter—clean sidewalks didn’t affect their profits. She blinked up at him through blue-rimmed glasses, studying him, her head tilted. It appeared he passed muster. She smiled and put the lock into his hand. “Please. I’d be grateful.” She stepped aside. “It’s a nuisance to be so short. If I’d been born here, it would be different. Now, in Japan the children are growing up on hamburgers and pizzas, and they’ll all be tall as Americans.”

Fastening the padlock, Dave started to cite the caterpillar in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
who indignantly claimed that two inches was quite a good height, indeed, then thought better of it. “My name is Brandstetter.” He took from his inside jacket pocket the ostrich-hide folder that held his private investigator’s license, and showed it to her. “I’m working with the police. The case involves a child who comes here. Zach Gruber.”

“Oh, dear.” She peered up at him, eyes anxious. “Has anything happened to him? Is he all right?”

“A lot has happened to him.” Dave put the folder away. “But aside from a bruise on his face, I don’t think he’s hurt.” He glanced at the buildings. “You’re—?”

“Celia Yamashita,” she said. “It’s my school.”

Dave said, “A shooting took place at Zach’s apartment complex last night, he saw someone standing over the victim, and that someone saw him and kidnapped him.” The schoolmistress put a hand to her forehead. He said, “Don’t be upset. He got away, a friend of mine scooped him up off the beach and called the police, and he’s safe now—”

“But doesn’t that explain the bruise?” she said.

“He claims not, says he fell down earlier, and banged his face. He’s accident-prone. It happens all the time.”

“‘This is a recorded message,’” she said grimly.

“He’s come to school battered, has he?”

“The first time, he claimed he’d fallen down stairs. I phoned his home, couldn’t reach anyone, so I took him to my doctor. He didn’t think it was a fall, but he couldn’t be sure what had happened.”

“And the second time?” Dave said.

“He was a sight. He said his mother stopped the car suddenly to avoid a collision, and he banged his face on the glove compartment.” Celia Yamashita glanced at her watch, picked up a shoulder bag from the sidewalk, started away. Dave strolled along beside her. She went on, “This time I thought Child Welfare better know about it. They interviewed Zach and then they talked to the parents. Nothing. The neighbors couldn’t contribute anything. That Mr. Gruber drinks and gets loud and verbally abusive sometimes and she screams at him—nothing about child abuse.”

“But you’re not convinced?” Dave said.

She threw him a glum smile. “I’m not convinced. And neither are you, Mr. Brandstetter, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Does he fall asleep a lot during the days?”

She cocked her head. “How did you know?”

“He seems to spend his nights wandering around the apartment complex, and he keeps saying there are good hiding places there. But he won’t say why that’s important to him—who it is he wants to hide from.”

“He keeps things to himself.”

“Frightened into silence?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” They’d gone down a gritty alley of abandoned auto carcasses. Behind the school, she unlocked a Japanese economy car. “And something else. He never cries. All the children have little mishaps. If he hurts himself, or someone hurts him—not a sound, not a tear. So, whatever the neighbors say, I think his father abuses him and threatens him with worse if he cries, so of course, no one hears.” Celia Yamashita tossed her bag into the car. “As for his mother—well, what can you say? She’s a waitress at a cocktail bar. They’re”—she blinked into the westering sunlight while she groped for words—“not exactly parenting material, are they?” She got into the little car, slammed the door, peered out at him, worrying the subject some more. “I mean, one day—not long after she first brought Zach here—she sent a man from the bar to pick him up after school. A musician in torn jeans and long hair. Not a responsible-looking person. Very strange eyes. I hated letting him take Zach, really, but she’d phoned ahead. It was an emergency. And Zach seemed to know him and trust him.”

“A guitarist?” Dave said. “Name of Cricket?”

She started the car. “That’s the one. Cricket.”

He reached the canyon house at sunset, dog-tired. This happened to him nowadays. He wasn’t sure why. He was sure he didn’t want to know why. Scarcely noticing the red roadster parked beside him, he climbed out of the Jaguar, locked it, went around the front building into the courtyard sheltered by the old oak—and stopped. The cookshack windows glowed with light. He pulled the screen door, pushed the wooden door, and Amanda smiled at him from the massive old farmhouse stove where she was cooking, wrapped in a yellow apron. Neatly made, not yet forty, pretty and bright and tiny, she was of all unlikely things Dave’s stepmother, Carl Brandstetter’s widow, widow number nine.

The first, Dave’s mother, was long dead. Dave didn’t remember her. Of the others he’d seen little once Carl had shed them, trailing jewelry, Paris gowns, and money. Most had shown up for the great man’s funeral, a few years back. It had been quite a crowd. How different they’d been from each other. No one could accuse Carl Brandstetter of marrying the same woman over and over again. Quite the reverse. Dave remembered some of them kindly. To most of them, even when he was small and lived at home, he’d been as dim a presence as they’d been to him.

Young and lovely as she was, and deeply in love with Carl, Amanda might not have lasted, either. In more than seventy years of living, Carl had never got the hang of constancy. But he hadn’t been given time to tire of Amanda. Late one night, only a few short years into their marriage, while driving ninety miles an hour on a freeway, he’d had a heart attack, and totaled his Bentley and himself—and so Amanda became widow of record.

Lost and forlorn, wandering aimless through the handsome, heartlessly empty rooms of a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, Amanda had needed something to do with her time, and Dave had asked her to revamp these shacky stable buildings into livable quarters. She’d done a smart job, and with Madge Dunstan’s seconding, he’d got her to set up in business on Rodeo Drive, where she’d prospered and made a name for herself. Picture spreads of her work had been in all the glossy shelter magazines. More importantly, she’d become Dave’s friend.

“Dave, I’m so glad.” She opened a massive old oak icebox in which she’d concealed the works of a state-of-the-art refrigerator, and lifted out of it a misty pitcher and a frosty glass. While she poured a martini for him, she said, “Dave Brandstetter, Cliff Callahan.” She meant a giant of a boy who sat on a chair at the big scrubbed deal table in the middle of the room. He rose and held out a huge, very clean hand. His blue eyes twinkled. His voice rumbled from a chest that stretched hell out of the cloth on what ought to have been a roomy shirt. “How are you, Mr. Brandstetter? Good to know you.” He crushed Dave’s hand when he shook it. “Amanda thinks the world of you. She talks about you all the time. We’re going to get married.”

“This is a surprise,” Dave said to Amanda.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “I wanted you to be the first to know, and I didn’t want it to be on the phone. Anyway, your phone is always unplugged. So I took a chance on your being home tonight.” She put the icy glass in his hand. “I was counting on your promise not to sneak out of retirement again.” Her look was suspicious. “You haven’t, have you?”

Dave sat at the table. “It’s touch and go. I promised Cecil I wouldn’t. I’d like to keep that promise, but—” He shrugged, and sipped the martini. It would probably knock him out. That’s what martinis were doing to him lately. But he wasn’t going to admit this now. Besides, it tasted good. “This is glorious,” he told her. “Thank you.” Very casually, he got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of Marlboros. Amanda was busy making salad dressing and didn’t notice. He sat down again, quickly opened the pack, lit a cigarette, and was so relieved to have smoke in his lungs once more he almost wept. He sipped the martini and said, “You like children, Mr. Callahan?”

Callahan was blond, with skin like a girl’s. He blushed and gave Amanda a sheepish glance. “We haven’t talked about it yet.”

“Dave,” Amanda said, “what a question.”

“Madge found a small runaway boy called Zach Gruber on her stretch of beach this morning. It looks as if his father beats him. I think so, the woman who runs his preschool thinks so. And so does Jeff Leppard, which means little Zach is very likely going to end up in a foster home. And that means a succession of foster homes for years and years. Sometimes that works out. But not often. Today’s world is hard enough to survive in even for kids with parents who stick around and treat them kindly.”

Amanda was back at the stove. Whatever she’d concocted there filled the air with tantalizing smells. “No—we’re not candidates for adoption. Not yet.”

Now Dave remembered where he’d glimpsed Callahan. On television. In a series about a daredevil young electronics whiz with an advanced-state helicopter called Icarus that he kept hidden in improbable quarters, slumland warehouse on the outside, magical palace full of winking, beeping electronics on the inside, and which helped him solve crimes, destroy evildoers, and rescue maidens in distress. He said to Callahan, “I expect Zach is a fan of yours.”

“He’d be disappointed,” Callahan said, “when he looked around my digs and couldn’t find Icarus.” He laughed. “Or even one computer. Hell, I can’t figure out how to hitch up my VCR. Don’t tell anybody, but I can’t even drive a car.”

Dave laughed. “I didn’t know they hired actors like that. Not anymore. What happened to ‘Cut to the chase’?”

BOOK: Country of Old Men
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