Country of Old Men (6 page)

“Balloons belong in the hands of children at circuses,” Dave said, “not shoved up old men’s arteries.”

Cecil opened his mouth, closed it again firmly, looked away. He laid the paper on the hearth, picked up his coffee mug and drank from it. He leaned forward in the chair. “Dave—I’m sorry Max died. And all the others in your life that aren’t here anymore. But, damn it, grieving won’t bring them back. And I’m here, Dave. And I love you. Doesn’t that matter?” Tears brightened his eyes. “You can’t die on me. What kind of life would I have then?”

“A heart attack can be neat,” Dave said. “I’d hate wasting away, being bedridden, a wheelchair case. I can tell you for sure that looking after a foul-tempered old man being eaten up by cancer is not the kind of life I want for you.”

“Jesus, what a morning.” Cecil jumped up and went to one of the windows box-framed by the bookshelves. It stood open. A branch from one of the untrimmed shrubs outside reached in. He snatched a handful of leaves. “If you can feel better and live a normal life by going to a doctor and getting your heart patched up, why, why, why do you act this way? Hate me. That’s all I can see in it.”

“It doesn’t have to be a bad morning,” Dave said. “We can change the subject. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with my heart to be fixed. That’s your idea.”

“You didn’t see yourself last night.”

Dave took a warm, buttery cornmeal muffin from the basket and held it out. “Come eat this. Comfort food. Isn’t that why you made it?”

Cecil dropped the leaves out the window, came back, took the muffin, studied it. “I made it because I have figured out something science doesn’t yet know.” He sat down, bit into the muffin, hummed happily, licked his fingers, drank some coffee. “That corn doesn’t damage the heart the way wheat does. North Americans eat wheat flour. Aztecs ate cornmeal,
masa.
You ever see those pyramids they built in the jungles down there? A hundred feet high? Steps all the way to the top? No bad hearts among those people.”

“Brilliant.” Dave ate a muffin himself. Drinking coffee, smoking, he said, “Did the phone ring earlier?”

Cecil was working on another muffin. He nodded. When he’d got the muffin down, he said, “Joey Samuels. He said the police released Zach to his loving parents last night. Juvenile thinks he got bruised during the kidnapping.”

“Zach doesn’t think so,” Dave said.

“Aren’t experts wonderful?” Cecil said.

“I’ll let you know when I meet one,” Dave said.

He toiled back up to the loft and slept again. At three-thirty he awoke. The afternoon was warm. Dim sounds of music reached him. Mostly thudding bass. From the front building. Cecil and Dave agreed on Bach and Bartok, Mahler and Mozart, Bellini and Berg. And on jazz—they both liked it suave, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Hodges, Lionel Hampton. But on rock they did not see eye to eye. Cecil bought armfuls of CDs by groups with outlandish names, clothes, haircuts, and listened to them by himself, driving to and from work in his van. He went to monstrous concerts in vast arenas with friends his own age from Channel Three, Jesus Salcido, Curly Ravitch, Billy Choy. At home, he rarely played rock unless Dave was away. Today, Dave might as well be away—and, time on his hands, that appeared to be what he was doing. Probably dancing. All by himself in that big empty building. Picturing it made Dave sad. But he hadn’t the energy to go to him and be company for him. Certainly not to dance. Wanly, he reached for the telephone on the bedside table and rang Jeff Leppard to report what he’d learned at Shadows.

“What are you trying to say?” Leppard asked.

“That Len Gruber is a liar. He did know Cricket. Maybe instead of passing out that night, he looked into Zach’s room, saw he was gone, went hunting for him, caught Cricket prowling around, thought he’d come for Tessa, and shot him.”

“Where did he get the gun?” Leppard said. “We know Cricket owned a gun, a thirty-two, it was registered, but—”

“Why hadn’t he left it behind at Rachel’s? It was her place they shared while they lived together. He’d have a key. She wasn’t there, maybe he went in and got it and when Gruber surprised him, he pulled it out to protect himself.”

“And Gruber took it away from him,” Leppard asked, “and shot him with it, and then dropped it for Rachel to pick up?”

“Maybe there was a struggle,” Dave said, “and he didn’t have time to find it in the dark when he heard her coming. Had to get out of sight. He must have done that very quickly. I’ll time it myself, but the way Zach tells it, he was down those stairs and in sight of that breezeway only seconds after he heard the shots.”

“And the only person he saw was Rachel.”

Dave frowned. “He saw Cricket. Celia Yamashita, the woman who runs Toyland School, says Zach knew him. Why didn’t he recognize him lying there dead?”

“You just said it,” Leppard answered. “Too dark. Somebody let it slip last night that Cricket was dead. Zach hadn’t known. It hit him hard. He cried.”

“Ms. Yamashita says he never cries,” Dave said.

“Tessa told Samuels that Cricket was Zach’s idol. When he grows up, he wants to play the guitar, just like Cricket.”

“Another reason for Len Gruber to hate the man.”

Leppard grunted. “And to hate his own kid, apparently.”

“Zinneman says he has a big problem with jealousy. Zinneman also says Rachel would never kill Cricket.”

“So does Jordan Vickers,” Leppard said. “But drugs damage brains, Dave, you know that. An addict can quit too late. You can’t judge them like ordinary people.”

“Have you found her yet?”

“None of the neighbors has any clue to where she’d go. She’s not with her father. He’s the only family she’s got. Nobody at the record company where she works can even guess.”

“Not a woman named Karen? She and Rachel were close.”

“I don’t remember any Karen,” Leppard said. “Vickers says Rachel would never go back to the street crowd she ran with when she did drugs. We checked them out, anyway.”

“The truth is not in them,” Dave said.

“I know that, but the way they lied—nobody’s seen her.”

“Somebody has,” Dave said.

“Meaning, you’re going to find her for us?” Leppard said. “Your buddy Harris told Samuels this morning you’re suffering from exhaustion and you need a long rest.”

“And you cheered,” Dave said. “Sorry, but this setback is strictly temporary, Lieutenant. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, Harris wants you in the hospital.”

“I’ll be leaping gracefully through hoops,” Dave said, “catching beach balls on my nose.”

“Good—just forget about catching Rachel Klein.”

He was steady again, going downstairs. He showered, shaved, climbed to the loft without gasping, without losing the strength in his legs. Pulling on fresh jeans, he smiled to himself. Those martinis of Amanda’s were to blame. He’d been tired when he drank them. And they’d finished him. He’d kept going, like a cartoon character who’s walked into thin air off a cliff, but it was dumb luck he’d made it to the marina to drop Callahan. It was a miracle he’d been able to talk sense to Zinneman—if he had. He wouldn’t touch gin and vermouth again. He flapped into a blue gingham shirt, tucked in the tails, and the door knocker clattered.

“You have noisy neighbors,” Charlie Norton said.

The music from the front building banged around the courtyard. Dave summoned her indoors. She was handsomely groomed, but big and beefy. Two friends out of the past in two days. Strange. He hadn’t seen Charlie since a class reunion he’d made the mistake of going to in Pasadena back in the 1960s. He couldn’t now remember why. Maybe he’d been over there on a case and stopped in out of curiosity. Jack Helmers had been there, Ray Lollard, Mel Fleisher, who’d remained his friends down the years. But of the others, Dave had recollected only a few. Among them had been Charlie, still slender then, still striking looking. She’d been wild in the years just before the war. There’d been a lot of stories about her sexual escapades. He’d forgotten the details, and so had everyone else, evidently. With her robust personality and off-kilter sense of humor, she’d won a lot of friends in school. And kept most of them, in spite of the scandals. She’d married a solid citizen—broker, banker, attorney?—had three kids. When the husband died, she grew active in service clubs, the Red Cross, Community Chest.

“This is a surprise,” Dave said.

“You look fine,” she said.

“So do you,” Dave said. “As always. Sit down, Charlie. A drink?”

“Got any Campari?” She swept a cashmere shawl off her broad shoulders, draped it across the couch back, sat in a wing chair. “Nobody has it, but it’s all I drink. No more martinis. Do they stun you? They stun me.”

Dave only laughed, found the Campari, dusted off the bottle, poured her a glass, poured himself Glenlivet, and joined her by the fireplace. She took the glass and said, “I was in the neighborhood, sort of, and thought I ought to see you. You know why?”

“Because we’re none of us getting any younger,” Dave said. “And suddenly everyone’s taken to dying.”

“I reject it as the in thing to do.” She tasted the drink. “But I gather it’s not optional.”

“So they tell me,” he said.

She looked around the room. “You’ve had great success. What? A billionaire or something.”

He made a face. “Not from my own efforts. You remember my father. He left me rich.”

“I remember your father. Handsome? My God. And did he ever know it.” She laughed. Her laugh had always been a treat to hear. “He made a pass at me once, when I came by your place to pick you up. Your car was bust. We were going to watch Jackie Robinson play basketball. He played everything in those days. And better than anyone else.”

“Carl made a pass at you? Before he asked for your hand in marriage? I can’t believe it.” Dave lit a cigarette. “He was a stickler for the proprieties. If there was one thing he believed in it was marriage.”

“I know. He did it a dozen times, or something, didn’t he?” She laughed again. “Well, maybe you’re right. But the proposal and the pass came very close together. And afterward I waited outside in the car, rain, leaky roof and all.”

“A virtuous young lady,” Dave said. “Too bad. If you’d married him, you’d have got very rich, and you and I could have had wonderful times together.”

“Oh, I would have married you in a minute, if you’d asked me. But you chose that decorator boy—what was his name? Rod something. Dave”—she looked strict and sober—“he was terribly swishy. Everybody noticed.”

“Even I,” Dave said with a thin smile. “I didn’t expect everybody to love him. I loved him. And he loved me, which was not as easy as you might think, you romantic, you. I have it on his authority that I am a cold-blooded son of a bitch. But he stuck it. For twenty-two years. His name was Rod Fleming. He died in 1966, and I still miss him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean—”

“How are your kids?”

“No longer kids. In fact, now they have kids. Harry teaches at Stanford—political science. George is in the state attorney general’s office, and already campaigning for the Big Job.” She wrote
Big Job
in the air with a finger. “He’ll get it, too. Janice raises pedigreed dogs. I can’t remember the name—the little Tibetan ones. Darling.”

“You must be proud,” Dave said. “You should be.”

“Oh, phoo. I haven’t been on Ted Koppel, I haven’t been profiled in
Newsweek,
I haven’t been on ‘Donahue.’”

“Neither have I—not even on drag queen day,” Dave said.

“Well,” she laughed, “you can’t have everything.” She sipped her Campari, got out of her chair, went to study the bookshelves. “Speaking of the departed”—she made her tone casual, almost indifferent—“have you heard about Jack Helmers? You were close in school.”

“Not as close as you.” Charlie had been on the staff of the school paper when Jack was editor. They’d been sweethearts for a while. Then one of those salacious stories about Charlie had licked across the campus like a wicked, quick-moving grass fire, and she’d left the paper, and the loving couple wasn’t a couple anymore. Jack never spoke her name again. And now, fifty years later, what was Charlie up to? Dave said carefully, “They’re saying he’s dead.”

She reached up. “You seem to have all of his books.”

“He used to mail them to me,” Dave said.

She took a book down, pretended to browse in it. “You didn’t see each other? Lunch. Theatre?”

“Not for years.” Dave watched her put the book back and drop into the wing chair again. He said, “He’d write a note sometimes when he sent a new book. I’d write him back a thank-you letter. That’s all. I gather that after Katherine died he took to living like a hermit.”

“Gossip has it he was writing a book about all of us. When we were too young to know better.”

So that was it. Dave smiled to himself, sipped his whiskey. “That would have made lively reading.”

“You haven’t heard anything about it?”

“Maybe he died before he could finish it,” Dave said.

“Oh, I hope not,” she said. “I’d love to read it—wouldn’t you? Delicious. All those old backseat scandals?” Her eager smile was supposed to convince him she meant it.

He didn’t believe her—not for a minute.

T
HE HALFWAY HOUSE HAD
once been a mansion. A big frame place, it reared up with bay windows and turrets on a shacky street out Venice Boulevard toward the beach. Most of the houses were one-story cottages. Grass still grew in the front yards of a few and the shrubs were trimmed. But in front of most, the ground was bare and served as parking space for rusty cars. The mansions on the corners opposite the halfway house had torn window screens, broken porch steps, peeling paint, tarpaper patches on the roof. Little brown half-naked kids played outside.

But the halfway house itself, behind its ponderous old date palms, sported new paint, new aluminum screens, neatly mowed and weeded lawns, even flower beds. Dave went up a lately laid and very carefully swept concrete footpath to the porch steps. Above these hung a carved and gilded sign:
Tomorrow House.
The carving wasn’t good but it was earnest. Dave crossed the porch and rang a bell. A twentyish young woman in jeans, a sweatshirt with the arms cut off, and a band around her head opened the door and smiled. She was painfully thin, and missing a few teeth.