Country of Old Men (8 page)

“Men do it, too,” she said defensively.

“True. Did she know Cricket was out of prison?”

“She’d have told me. She thought he’d be in for years.”

“Then why did she take her things?” Dave said.

Karen Goddard only stared at him. Not in fright, no. Something grimmer. But he didn’t ask what. She wouldn’t tell him. He said thank you and good-bye, and left.

A
YELLOW RENTAL PANEL
truck was parked, facing the street, in the driveway of the small stucco house in Van Nuys. A pair of trees of heaven bowed over squares of unmowed lawn. Dave pushed trailing branches aside to go up the path to the door. He pressed the bell button there, but the response came from the driveway. A voice called, “What do you want?” Dave looked. A short old man with a shock of white hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses slid a carton into the truck and came across the grass, brushing dust from his hands. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow. His trousers were old and shapeless, the kind kept for household chores. “I’m Irwin Klein. Did you want to see me?”

Dave showed him his license and told him his name and the reason he’d come.

Klein said, “The police were already here. A black man named Leppard—a little bit like his namesake, too. And a nice Jewish boy named Samuels.”

“I’ve heard their report,” Dave said. “There’s nothing in it about Rachel’s whereabouts.”

“She isn’t here,” Klein said glumly. “She wouldn’t come here. It made me laugh to think the police would believe she’d come running to me when she was in trouble. Who am I to help her? Only her father, who loved her from babyhood, my only child, child of my old age, I who gave her—” He broke that off, and turned for a moment to watch a youngish, soft-looking man in T-shirt and jeans hoist another carton into the yellow truck. He called, “Did you list them all?”

“Every title, Mr. Klein,” the man said wearily.

“And you numbered the carton? And the number is on the list?”

“It’s on the clipboard. You want to see it?”

Klein shook his head. “Just don’t miss any—that’s all I ask. That Fliegel will claim he didn’t get this, he didn’t get that. He’ll try to cheat me.”

“I won’t miss any.” The man went back up the driveway and out of sight.

“I lost my shop,” Klein said. “An Iranian bought the building and raised the rent. I was barely able to hang on as it was. Pay four times more? In that location, with robbers walking in off the street? No way.”

Dave remembered now where he’d met Klein. “The bookshop on Santa Monica near Fairfax?”

“‘The Shakespeare Head,’” Klein smiled. “You remember it?” He peered through those thick lenses. “Maybe you were a customer once?”

“More than once, Mr. Klein,” Dave said. “It was a good shop. You moved the books here, did you?”

“To my garage.” His laugh was mournful. “While I looked for another place. They’re all too expensive.” He opened the door of the house, gestured Dave inside. “I’m too old to start again, anyway.” The living room was cool and dim. Leading the way through it, and through a dusty dining room, and into a sun-bright kitchen, he went on talking. “This city has run money mad. What do they care for books? The lives and wisdom of the best minds of the past? What does any of that mean to hustlers and gangsters? They call themselves businessmen, but they’re not.” He opened a refrigerator and brought out bottles of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic. “Gouging decent people, paying off officials to get their way.” He pried the caps off the squatty bottles. “Respect for literature, art, music—not unless there’s a profit to be made.” He took drinking glasses from a dish rack beside the sink, set them on the table of a breakfast nook. “We had a beautiful public library in this city. Downtown. You remember that library?”

Dave nodded and poured celery tonic into his glass.

“Well, do you know what happened to it? Developers wanted the land it stands on. So they hired an arsonist to burn it out. He was never caught. Shall I tell you why?” Klein drank off half his celery tonic, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, belched. “Because the authorities were bribed to fumble the investigation. Why not? These big developers have millions to buy whatever they want—while the homeless starve and freeze, and the second largest city in America goes without a public library. It stands there, but empty. And you’ll see—one of these days, it will be gone.”

“You were telling me about Rachel,” Dave said.

Klein blinked, frowned. “Ah, yes. Of course. Excuse me. I’m upset. Losing my shop—it’s the last piece of my life I had left. First Rachel, then my wife—she died after three operations, a year in the hospital—and now my shop. Everything that meant anything to me. All gone.”

“Why did you lose Rachel?”

“Because of Cricket. She brought him to meet me. He was trash. A wonderful musician, she said. His music was also trash. I knew he’d mean the end of her. I told her so. And she never came back. When her mother was dying, I went to find her.” Klein winced. “I didn’t know her. She looked terrible, sick, starved, she didn’t talk sense—as if she’d lost her mind. She used filthy language—my little Rachel.”

“It was the drugs talking,” Dave said.

“She’d always loved her mother, they were friends, true friends. But, no, she wouldn’t go to her. I told her her mother was begging to see her. ‘Please come now,’ I said, ‘there’s not much time left. She’s slipping away from us, Rachel.’” Tears leaked from under the thick spectacles. “She ran into a bedroom and locked the door. I could hear her weeping. I knocked on the door. ‘Please, Rachel, come on now, hurry.’ But she wouldn’t open the door. She screamed at me to go away. She was sobbing so I could hardly make out the words, but these I heard—‘She wouldn’t know me, anyway, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’m not her Rachel anymore.’”

“Mr. Vickers tells me she’s changed now.”

“How changed—to shoot a man, even such a man as that, in cold blood? By you, that’s changed?”

“I don’t think she did it, Mr. Klein,” Dave said. “And neither do you.”

Klein lifted his hands and let them fall. “What do I know? I thought I knew her. Music. She loved music. The finest music.” He peered at Dave through those lenses again. “You say you visited my shop. Then you know I always had classical music on the radio. Softly. In the background. It was the same at home. She was raised surrounded only by the best symphonies, concertos, chamber music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—the finest orchestras, the greatest conductors, never mind some of them were Nazis.”

“I’m told she had a beautiful voice,” Dave said.

“Rich and deep. Her high school teacher called it a huge voice. We took her to our cantor—a great singer in his time, Chaim Chernov—you’ve heard of him, maybe?”

Dave nodded, recalling a lieder recital, long ago, in a wooden auditorium at some Westside park. Brahms, Schubert, Mahler. A tenor like a golden bell.

“He said she should think seriously about the opera.” The memory thrilled Klein. He placed his hands together in front of his mouth, his eyes bright, and said again, in an awed whisper, “The opera.”

“She was working for Say What? Records when she met Cricket,” Dave said. “How was that?”

“To pay rent on her own place in Los Angeles,” Klein said. “Chernov retired as cantor, and left the valley for an apartment he owns there. He was her teacher, her mentor, her god—she had to be near him.” His face clouded. “I should have kept her here. Her mother didn’t want her to go. She knew already she was sick, sicker than she told either of us. But she smiled and let her move away because it would be best for her future. She had to study, to practice, to learn. So much. The days when a singer could simply sing, those days are gone, you know. These young artists today—they know harmony, counterpoint, what can I tell you? A dozen languages, history, dancing, acting—”

“And then she met Cricket,” Dave said.

Klein scowled. “And that was the end of her.”

“Jordan Vickers thinks she made a complete recovery.”

“What does he know? A man who goes around with his head shaved and wearing earrings and rags? What kind of authority is he supposed to be? A onetime basketball player, Rachel said, when he brought her here to see me. What can a basketball player know? They pay them to play basketball at college—they don’t have to learn anything. Half of them can’t even read.”

“He tried to reunite the two of you,” Dave said. “Didn’t that make you think well of him?”

Klein slid out of the breakfast nook. “Until she told me they were sleeping together. I don’t think well of a man who would do that.” He opened a door under the sink and dropped the empty bottles into a trash basket there, and closed the door. “Or a woman either.” He turned and picked up the empty glasses and set them in the sink. He shook his head. “Rachel, Rachel.”

Dave got out of the booth. “This apartment she took to be near her teacher. Was that where she’s living now?”

“Mr. Klein?” Screen door hinges creaked. The balding young man came in from the backyard. “We haven’t got a carton that will hold that whole set of Dickens. Always at least two volumes over.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Klein said. The young man left, and Klein told Dave, “No. A young woman at the record company had an empty bedroom in her apartment, and Rachel moved in with her. They split the rent.” Klein made another sour face. “Then she met Cricket and got her own place.”

“Do you remember the young woman’s name?”

“Karen Goddard,” Klein said. “I liked her.”

Before he got onto the freeway, he stopped for gas. While the tank filled, he rang Cecil from a pay telephone in a sun-hot glass half-booth beside the station office.

“Just to say I’m going home to rest now.”

“Wonderful,” Cecil said. “You told me you were going to do that by noon. Dave, it’s almost three o’clock.”

“One thing led to another,” Dave said.

“And better late than never, I know. How do you feel?”

“Too good to lie down on the job.”

“Since we’re into clichés,” Cecil said, “how about ‘Tomorrow is another day’?”

“I have places to go, people to see.”

“What’s the matter with Leppard?” Cecil said. “What’s the matter with Samuels? It’s their job, Dave.”

“I was spun a very delicate web of lies at that record company this morning. It needs to be taken apart strand by strand. Leppard wouldn’t have the patience, Samuels wouldn’t have the acuity.”

“Lies about what? Lies why?”

“If I knew that,” Dave said, “I could rest.”

“Rest anyway. You promised.”

“Yes, all right,” Dave grumbled.

“‘And thank you for caring, Cecil,’” Cecil said.

“I hope that goes without saying,” Dave said.

When he jounced down from Horseshoe Canyon trail into the tree-sheltered brick yard of his house, it was four. The adrenaline had ebbed that had kept him going from Tomorrow House to Say What? Records to Irwin Klein’s small, sad house in the Valley, and he was tired again. Too tired. As Cecil had predicted. He stepped on the brake pedal and groaned. A limousine was parked next to the house. At the wheel, a uniformed chauffeur read a magazine. The rear door opened and a stocky man with a red face climbed out. He wore a dark pin-striped suit and a homburg. The moment made Dave feel he was viewing a newscast. He parked the Jaguar, switched off the engine, and climbed wearily out.

“It’s Morse, isn’t it?” He walked around the car and the two men shook hands. “Morse Campbell?”

“I want to go very cautiously with this, Dave.” Campbell took up the conversation as if they’d begun it yesterday and had to break it off. They hadn’t. Their last conversation had been in 1941, a debating team matter. Dave almost laughed aloud. Campbell hadn’t changed. He’d always done this—no hello’s, how-are-you’s, small talk. He’d launched right into whatever was on his mind.

“Come inside,” Dave said. “Have a drink.”

“I’ve been here since one,” Campbell complained. He glanced at the chauffeur, who gave an impassive nod. Campbell took Dave’s arm and urged him along into the courtyard under the oak. “Charlie Norton said you’d retired, so I figured I’d find you at home. I didn’t want to talk about this on the phone.” Dave unlocked the thick, glass-paned door to the front building. Campbell had been stuffy in high school. Since then, he’d been ambassador to some tiny Central American country, served in one presidential cabinet, and chaired endless futile commissions investigating who remembered what. Dave didn’t think any of this was calculated to make him less stuffy. Or any brighter. He was a dimwit in school, he’d always be a dimwit.

Amanda had designed the back building of this place for relaxing in. The front one was for more formal use—except when Cecil listened to rock in it. But as Dave showed him inside, he guessed Campbell would find even this building off-putting—with its two floor levels, bare rafters, pitched roof, clerestory windows, discrete groupings of handsome furniture, looming loudspeakers, racked stereo equipment, shelves of records and tapes, large Indian baskets and jars, Doug Sawyer’s tall portrait of Dave over the fireplace.

But his mind was elsewhere. Dave put him on a couch near the bar and served him up Jack Daniel’s and himself a Glenlivet. When he handed the glass to him, Campbell was staring blankly with his dumb, bulging eyes at an array of painted Mexican pottery animals on the coffee table. “He’s playing possum,” he grunted, and tasted his drink. “He’s no more dead than you or me.”

“Jack Helmers?” Dave didn’t sit down. He cocked his head. “You’ve seen him, have you?”

“I haven’t.” Campbell grunted, leaning forward to set his drink on the table. He blinked up at Dave. “But you have. He came by here the other day. You two had lunch together at a place called Max Romano’s.”

“You learned all this from Charlie?”

A headshake. “All I learned from Charlie was that you lied to her, pretended to believe he was dead. You said you hadn’t seen him in donkey’s years. Why did you do that?”

“It was a judgment call,” Dave said. “I don’t think Jack is in very good emotional shape these days. He doesn’t need people climbing all over him about that book.”

“Ah.” Campbell almost stood up in his excitement. “Then there is a book. You admit that.”