Country of Old Men (7 page)

“Welcome to Tomorrow House,” she said. “Come in.”

“Thanks.” Dave stepped into a hallway where a stately staircase climbed. To either side sliding doors stood open on large white rooms. In one of these, bulgy, threadbare thrift-shop sofas and armchairs watched a battered television set. In the other room, bare except for posters and flyers tacked to the walls and to the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace, a dozen people, most of them young, all of them scruffy, sat in a circle on metal folding chairs, talking, arguing, weeping, cursing. Dave told the girl, “I have an appointment with Jordan Vickers.”

She led him down dodgy hallways past rumpled rooms crowded with beds, backpacks, piled cartons of clothing, through a kitchen where ragged young people washed dishes, peeled potatoes, kneaded bread, and finally onto a screened back porch. At one end of this were a bed, chest of drawers, bookcase. At the other end a paper-piled desk, a computer, file cabinets. The man standing behind the desk, talking into a telephone, was tall—taller than Cecil. His clothes were thrift-shop stuff, like everyone else’s at Tomorrow House. Pushed back on his shaven head was a baseball cap with the lettering
Boss.
When he saw Dave, he gave him a quick pro forma smile, and stepped around behind the desk. Now Dave could read the message on his T-shirt.
Don’t Ask Me. You Are The Answer.
He hung up the phone and shook Dave’s hand.

“Mr. Brandstetter?” He waved at a stiff varnished chair. “Sit down, please. What can I do for you?”

Both men sat down. Dave said:

“I know what you told the police about Rachel. But you didn’t say anything about Cricket Shales. He was a drug dealer, I gather he was a user.” He glanced around. “Saving people from drugs is your life work, right? Didn’t you know Shales?”

“Only what Rachel told me,” Jordan Vickers said. “I would have helped him if I could, but it was too late then. He was already in police custody, awaiting trial.” Vickers spoke with precision, shaping his phrases. “Rachel I was able to do something for.”

“So I’m told. You became more than her counselor. You became her lover. You’re funded in part by the county. You hold a position of trust.” He pointed at a framed certificate on the wall. “Was your behavior ethical?”

Vickers shrugged coldly. “It was natural. And I don’t see that it concerns you.”

“She came here after finding Shales’s body near her apartment,” Dave said. “Asked you for advice. You advised her to go to the police. She refused.” Again he looked around him. “Where did she come, exactly? To that door—the back door?”

“Yes. She didn’t want to encounter anyone else. She knew where I sleep. She came to that door and knocked till I woke up.”

“When had you gone to bed?” Dave said.

Vickers scowled. “What difference does it make?”

“Did you know Shales had been released from prison?”

“What? Why—yes, no. No, I didn’t.”

“Wasn’t Rachel afraid of Cricket? Wouldn’t it have been a natural thing on your part to keep tabs on him so as to protect her from meeting him again? You certainly couldn’t have thought he’d help her rehabilitation.”

“Mr. Brandstetter.” Vickers opened both long hands above the heaped desk. “I have twenty lives to look after here. Everyone in my care gets every minute of attention I can give them. It’s me and them against a world of parole, welfare, bail bonds, prosecutors, police and sheriffs, and enough red tape to wrap up the known universe. No, I didn’t know Cricket Shales had been released from prison.”

“When did you go to bed that night?”

Vickers sighed impatiently. “I don’t remember. I’ve tried to train myself to quit work at midnight, no matter how much unfinished business remains. I’m getting better at it. No choice. I’ll be no use to anybody if I get sick.”

“When you go to bed, who takes over? Do you alert some member of your staff?”

“My only staff are people in the program. They live here. Our rule is lights out at ten,” Vickers said. “No. I’m the only one up late. The telephones are back here. One is by my bed. There’s also a very loud bell”—he pointed over the office door—“the kind they ring in school hallways, to wake me if someone in trouble comes to the front door.”

“So there’s no witness to when you went to bed.”

“What do I need with a witness?” Vickers scowled. “What are you implying?”

“When did Rachel arrive? Cricket died at midnight. The little boy she kidnapped says she drove around ‘a long time.’ He must have said he was hungry. She stopped and bought him a chili dog and an orange soda. Then she stopped again, somewhere, and put him into the trunk of her car. She told him she had to talk to somebody. That would be you—right?”

“I don’t understand about the little boy.” Vickers shook his head, troubled, grim. “I thought she had herself in better control. I couldn’t believe she’d go to pieces so completely. I was appalled. She threatened me with a gun.”

“You weren’t the first,” Dave said. “When she put Zach in the trunk she showed him the gun and told him she’d kill him if he made any noise.”

“Oh, no.” Vickers leaned back in his chair, tilted his head up, eyes closed. The baseball cap fell off. He paid it no attention, sat forward again, face twisted in pained disbelief. “Threatened a little child?”

“Are you so sure now she didn’t kill Shales?”

“She was clean, Mr. Brandstetter. Back at her job. Doing just fine. We had a beautiful relationship going between us. She’s a lovely, gentle girl. God gave her a beautiful voice. I was certain with the drugs and booze behind her, she’d make a career.” His face shadowed. “She’d have done it years ago if she hadn’t met Cricket.”

“The police are sure she killed him.”

“Have they found her? Lieutenant Leppard promised to call. I want to see her. Arrange bail, get her a lawyer.”

“They haven’t found her. Where is she, Mr. Vickers?”

“I only know she isn’t here.”

Dave stood up. “Maybe here is where she’ll come to.” He laid his card on the desk. “If so, call me, will you? I want to see her, too. Because I don’t think she did it.”

Vickers rose. “I’ll get someone to show you out.”

“This way is fine,” Dave said, pushed open the screen door, went down rickety steps, lacy at their edges with dry rot. He took a strip of cracked walk toward the driveway. This led him past a trash module. Sticking out of heaps of rubbish was a worn blue-and-white jogging shoe. He didn’t think he’d ever seen one so large. He picked it up and looked for its mate. Not here. A squatty youth came out of the stable, brushing sawdust off his sweaty bare chest and arms, and blinking in the morning sun.

“Help you?” he called.

“No, thanks.” Dave took the shoe away with him.

The address he had got from a phone book was of a long single-story warehouse in a sun-struck, beachside district of Santa Monica, where the only traffic seemed to be made up of seagulls and trucks. He left the Jaguar on tarmac gritty with blown sand and bleached and cracked by weather, and climbed steps to a block-long loading dock. He walked this dock, peering at signs beside or above or riveted to painted metal doors—signs for commercial photographers, advertising agencies, illustrators, magazine publishers, layout and design studios, mail-order merchandisers, TV production companies—until he found
SAY WHAT? RECORDS, INC
.

He pushed open the heavy door and found himself in a long hallway handsomely wall-painted in bright, clean geometric shapes, and lit by fluorescent tubes suspended from studded steel rafters under a pitched metal roof. The floor of the hallway was color-coded in stripes—red, yellow, blue, green, brown, white. He blinked around him and found a directory. The blue stripe would lead him where he wanted to go. He followed it along the hallway, around several corners into other hallways. At last the blue stripe veered and climbed beside a door to a bell button. He pushed the button. A latch clicked. He stepped inside.

He had braced himself to be met by loud music, but the only music came faintly from some far-off room. This office was quiet except for the click of computer keyboard keys under the fingers of a hefty black woman whose red-framed spectacles had thin gold chains hanging from the bows and around her neck. She turned from putting green letters on a monitor, let the glasses fall to the vast shelf of her bosom, and cocked her head at him. Plainly she didn’t know what to make of him. “The photographer for
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
is at the other end of the building,” she said.

Dave grinned. “I’m not a fashion model. My name is Dave Brandstetter.” He let the ostrich-hide folder that held his license fall open for her to see. “I’m a private investigator, assisting the Los Angeles police looking into the murder of Cricket Shales.”

She started to turn back to her work. “Police already been and gone.”

“I’m the second wave.” Dave put the license away. “It’s about Rachel Klein—who works here.”

“She hasn’t come back,” the woman said, “if that’s what you mean. After what she did? She’s no genius. If you know singers, especially wanna-be singers, you know they don’t run to brains—but she’s not an idiot.”

“She had a friend on the staff here called Karen,” Dave said. “Does she still work here?”

“Can’t get much work done, police always bothering her.”

“I don’t think they did,” Dave said. “I’m told somehow they missed her.”

“She’s in and out quite a bit.”

“She was with Rachel at a bar called Shadows the night Rachel first saw Cricket,” Dave said. “That’s why I need to talk to her.”

“That Cricket. He was nothing but trouble and misery for Rachel when he was alive. Looks like dead it’s no different—like there’s no end to it.”

“Maybe this time she was the troublemaker. He was alive and well till he met her again.”

“She never shot him,” the woman scoffed. “Rachel Klein? That helpless, simple little thing? No way.”

“Drugs changed her,” Dave said. “Cost her her job here, didn’t they?”

“Like I say—all Cricket’s fault. When they locked him up, she was all right again. Men.” She wagged her head grimly. “Nothing but bad news. I know. I had my share.”

Dave moved toward the hallway that was bringing the faint music. “Where do I find Karen?”

The woman picked up a telephone receiver, punched an extension number. “Karen? A Mr. Brandon here to see you. A private investigator. About Rachel.” She looked Dave over. “No, lean, blond, blue-eyed. And I’d say, just offhand, could take you to lunch at 72 Market Street if you smile pretty for him. Most likely in a Mercedes.” She hung up. “She’ll be right out.”

“It’s a Jaguar,” Dave said. He’d kept an old prejudice. He didn’t like it for anyone to think he’d buy a German car. Or a Japanese one for that matter. “What’s her last name?”

“Goddard.” The woman put on the red-framed glasses again and went back to work.

And Karen Goddard appeared. Dave didn’t know what he’d expected, but not this. She was tall, rangy, masculine in her walk and voice and dress. Her handshake was strong. She led him along the hallway. They passed a recording studio door with a red light glowing above it. And a moment later, at his back, came that blast of music he’d expected earlier. But it didn’t last. The thick studio door thudded shut again. Karen Goddard showed Dave into an office where young women moved busily among ferns and ficus trees, working computers, answering telephones, ripping pages off whining printers, turning green for split seconds in the light of copiers. Pop music posters and album covers decorated the walls. Karen Goddard led him to an office of four desks cut off from the bigger room by metal and glass partitions. No one else was in the office. She closed the door and said:

“Sit down, Mr. Brandon. What can I do for you?”

“Lieutenant Leppard of the homicide division was here day before yesterday to ask about Rachel Klein.”

She sat down and smiled faintly. “So they tell me. I was out of the office. At a meeting. Settling the details of a Triceratops concert at Universal Amphitheater. It’s not important. I couldn’t have told him anything.”

“You could have told him one thing,” Dave said. “He was here about the murder of Cricket Shales, Rachel’s onetime boyfriend. And you were with Rachel the night she met him. At a club called Shadows. Maybe you introduced them.”

She looked startled, and something more. But only for a second. She smiled. “You’re good at your job, aren’t you?”

“We’ll see,” Dave said. “Where is she, Ms. Goddard?”

“You think I could have told the police that, too?” She laughed. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke away. “She could be anyplace. If I were her, I’d be in Tierra del Fuego.”

“I’ll look there next,” Dave said. “Do you think she was so frightened of him she shot him?”

“She believed in life,” Karen Goddard said. “No—she wouldn’t have shot anyone—not even that miserable Cricket.”

“Am I right?” Dave lit a cigarette, happy to be in company that wouldn’t frown about it. “You knew him before you took Rachel to hear him that night?”

“A long time. He was a studio musician, a backup artist. He used to work here, as he did for a lot of other record producers. I can’t say I knew him—but I knew his work, and whatever his drawbacks as a human being, which turned out to be worse than those of Count Dracula, he was a gifted musician. Original. Imaginative. Terrific taste. Then one of the engineers here mentioned he played weekends all the time at Shadows, and I went to hear him.”

“And took Rachel—why?” He nodded. “That’s her desk. But two other people work here with you. Why not them?”

“She was new here, seemed kind of lonely. Besides, they didn’t give a damn about music. Rachel loved music.”

Dave rose, stepped to the desk with Rachel Klein’s name on it, and began opening and closing drawers.

Karen Goddard said, “Don’t you need a search warrant?”

“That’s strange. I don’t find any personal effects.”

“What do you mean? This is her workplace.”

“Women keep makeup, nail polish, that kind of thing in their desks.” He turned. “I’ll bet I’d find a lot of personal things in yours, if I looked. Lipstick, aspirin, chewing gum, Rolaids, cologne, God knows.”