Different Seasons (44 page)

“Like those hamburgers we had for lunch yesterday,” Weiskopf said, smiling. “Those Mac-Burgers.”

“Big Macs,” Richler said, and laughed. “Okay. So cross-cultural pollination doesn’t always work.” His smile faded. “He looks so clean-cut, you know?”

“Yes.”

“This is no j.d. from Vasco with hair down to his asshole and chains on his motorcycle boots.”

“No.” Weiskopf stared at the traffic all around them and was very glad he wasn’t driving. “He’s just a boy. A white boy from a good home. And I find it difficult to believe that—”

“I thought you had them ready to handle rifles and grenades by the time they were eighteen. In Israel.”

“Yes. But he was
fourteen
when all of this started. Why would a fourteen-year-old boy mix himself up with such a man as Dussander? I have tried and tried to understand that and still I can’t.”

“I’d settle for how,” Richter said, and flicked the cigarette out the window. It was giving him a headache.

“Perhaps, if it did happen, it was just luck. A coincidence. Serendipity. I think there is black serendipity as well as white.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richler said gloomily. “All I know is the kid is creepier than a bug under a rock.”

“What I’m saying is simple. Any other boy would have been more than happy to tell his parents, or the police. To say, ‘I have recognized a wanted man. He is living at this address. Yes, I am sure.’ And then let the authorities take over. Or do you feel I am wrong?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. The kid would be in the limelight for a few days. Most kids would dig that. Picture in the paper, an interview on the evening news, probably a school assembly award for good citizenship.” Richler laughed. “Hell, the kid would probably get a shot on
Real People.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” Richler said. He had to raise his voice slightly because ten-wheelers were passing the Nova on either side. Weiskopf looked nervously from one to the other. “You don’t want to know. But you’re right about most kids. Most kids.”

“But not
this
kid,” Weiskopf said. “This boy, probably by dumb luck alone, penetrates Dussander’s cover. Yet instead of going to his parents or the authorities ... he goes to Dussander. Why? You say you don’t care, but I think you do. I think it haunts you just as it does me.”

“Not blackmail,” Richler said. “That’s for sure. That kid’s got everything a kid could want. There was a dune-buggy in the garage, not to mention an elephant gun on the wall. And even if he wanted to squeeze Dussander just for the thrill of it, Dussander was practically unsqueezable. Except for those few stocks, he didn’t have a pot to piss in.”

“How sure are you that the boy doesn’t know you’ve found the bodies?”

“I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go back this afternoon and hit him with that. Right now it looks like our best shot.” Richler struck the steering wheel lightly. “If all of this had come out even one day sooner, I think I would have tried for a search warrant.”

“The clothes the boy was wearing that night?”

“Yeah. If we could have found soil samples on his clothes that matched the dirt in Dussander’s cellar, I almost think we could break him. But the clothes he was wearing that night have probably been washed six times since then.”

“What about the other dead winos? The ones your police department has been finding around the city?”

“Those belong to Dan Bozeman. I don’t think there’s any connection anyhow. Dussander just wasn’t that strong ... and more to the point, he had such a neat little racket already worked out. Promise them a drink and a meal, take them home on the city bus—the fucking city bus!—and waste them right in his kitchen.”

Weiskopf said quietly: “It wasn’t
Dussander
I was thinking of.”

“What do you mean by th—” Richler began, and then his mouth snapped suddenly closed. There was a long, unbelieving moment of silence, broken only by the drone of the traffic all around them. Then Richler said softly: “Hey. Hey, come on now. Give me a fucking br—”

“As an agent of my government, I am only interested in Bowden because of what, if anything, he may know about Dussander’s remaining contacts with the Nazi underground. But as a human being, I am becoming more and more interested in the boy himself. I’d like to know what makes him tick. I want to know
why.
And as I try to answer that question to my own satisfaction, I find that more and more I am asking myself
What else.”

“But—”

“Do you suppose, I ask myself, that the very atrocities in which Dussander took part formed the basis of some attraction between them? That’s an unholy idea, I tell myself. The things that happened in those camps still have power enough to make the stomach flutter with nausea. I feel that way myself, although the only close relative I ever had in the camps was my grandfather, and he died when I was three. But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out. And what do you think they would look like? Like mad Fuehrers with forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches,
heil-ing
all over the place? Like red devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?”

“I don’t know,” Richler said.

“I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants,” Weiskopf said: “Little mind-men with graphs and flow-charts and electronic calculators, all ready to start maximizing the kill ratios so that
next
time they could perhaps kill twenty or thirty millions instead of only six. And some of them might look like Todd Bowden.”

“You’re damn near as creepy as he is,” Richler said.

Weiskopf nodded. “It’s a creepy subject. Finding those dead men and animals in Dussander’s cellar . . .
that
was creepy,
nu
? Have you ever thought that maybe this boy began with a simple interest in the camps? An interest not much different from the interests of boys who collect coins or stamps or who like to read about Wild West desperados? And that he went to Dussander to get his information straight from the horse’s head?”

“Mouth,” Richler said automatically. “Man, at this point I could believe anything.”

“Maybe,” Weiskopf muttered. It was almost lost in the roar of another ten-wheeler passing them. BUDWEISER was printed on the side in letters six feet tall.
What an amazing country,
Weiskopf thought, and lit a fresh cigarette. They
don’t understand how we can live surrounded by half-mad Arabs, but if I lived here for two years I would have a nervous breakdown.
“Maybe. And maybe it isn’t possible to stand close to murder piled on murder and not be touched by it.”

The short guy who entered the squadroom brought stench after him like a wake. He smelled like rotten bananas and Wildroot Cream Oil and cockroach shit and the inside of a city garbage truck at the end of a busy morning. He was dressed in a pair of ageing herringbone pants, a ripped gray institutional shirt, and a faded blue warmup jacket from which most of the zipper hung loose like a string of pygmy teeth. The uppers of his shoes were bound to the lowers with Krazy Glue. A pestiferous hat sat on his head.

“Oh Christ, get out of here!” the duty sergeant cried. “You’re not under arrest, Hap! I swear to God! I swear it on my mother’s name! Get out of here! I want to breathe again.”

“I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman.”

“He died, Hap. It happened yesterday. We’ll all really fucked up over it. So get out and let us mourn in peace.”

“I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman!” Hap said more loudly. His breath drifted fragrantly from his mouth: a juicy, fermenting mixture of pizza, Hall’s Mentho-lyptus lozenges, and sweet red wine.

“He had to go to Siam on a case, Hap. So why don’t you just get out of here? Go someplace and eat a lightbulb.”

The duty sergeant fled the room. He returned about five minutes later with Bozeman, a thin, slightly stooped man of fifty.

“Take him into your office, okay, Dan?” the duty sergeant begged. “Won’t that be all right?”

“Come on, Hap,” Bozeman said, and a minute later they were in the three-sided stall that was Bozeman’s office. Bozeman prudently opened his only window and turned on his fan before sitting down. “Do something for you, Hap?”

“You still on those murders, Lieutenant Bozeman?”

“The derelicts? Yeah, I guess that’s still mine.”

“Well, I know who greased ’em.”

“Is that so, Hap?” Bozeman asked. He was busy lighting his pipe. He rarely smoked the pipe, but neither the fan nor the open window was quite enough to overwhelm Hap’s smell. Soon, Bozeman thought, the paint would begin to blister and peel. He sighed.

“You remember I told you Poley was talkin to a guy just a day before they found him all cut up in that pipe? You member me tellin you that, Lieutenant Bozeman?”

“I remember.” Several of the winos who hung around the Salvation Army and the soup kitchen a few blocks away had told a similar story about two of the murdered derelicts, Charles “Sonny” Brackett and Peter “Poley” Smith. They had seen a guy hanging around, a young guy, talking to Sonny and Poley. Nobody knew for sure if Poley had gone off with the guy, but Hap and two others claimed to have seen Poley Smith walk off with him. They had the idea that the “guy” was underage and willing to spring for a bottle of musky in exchange for some juice. Several other winos claimed to have seen a “guy” like that around. The description of this “guy” was superb, bound to stand up in court, coming as it did from such unimpeachable sources. Young, blond, and white. What else did you need to make a bust?

“Well, last night I was in the park,” Hap said, “and I just happened to have this old bunch of newspapers—”

“There’s a law against vagrancy in this city, Hap.”

“I was just collectin em up,” Hap said righteously. “It’s so awful the way people litter. I was doon a public surface, Lieutenant. A friggin public surface. Some of those papers was a week old.”

“Yes, Hap,” Bozeman said. He remembered—vaguely—being quite hungry and looking forward keenly to his lunch. That time seemed long ago now.

“Well, when I woke up, one of those papers had blew onto my face and I was lookin right at the guy. Gave me a hell of a jump, I can tell you. Look. This is the guy. This guy right here.”

Hap pulled a crumpled, yellowed, water-spotted sheet of newspaper from his warmup jacket and unfolded it. Bozeman leaned forward, now moderately interested. Hap put the paper on his desk so he could read the headline: 4 BOYS NAMED TO SOUTHERN CAL ALL-STARS. Below the head were four photos.

“Which one, Hap?”

Hap put a grimy finger on the picture to the far right. “Him. It says his name is Todd Bowden.”

Bozeman looked from the picture to Hap, wondering how many of Hap’s brain-cells were still unfried and in some kind of working order after twenty years of being sauteed in a bubbling sauce of cheap wine seasoned with an occasional shot of sterno.

“How can you be sure, Hap? He’s wearing a baseball cap in the picture. I can’t tell if he’s got blonde hair or not.”

“The grin,” Hap said. “It’s the way he’s grinnin. He was grinnin at Poley in just that same ain’t-life-grand way when they walked off together. I couldn’t mistake that grin in a million years. That’s him, that’s the guy.”

Bozeman barely heard the last; he was thinking, and thinking hard.
Todd Bowden.
There was something very familiar about that name. Something that bothered him even worse than the thought that a local high school hero might be going around and offing winos. He thought he had heard that name just this morning in conversation. He frowned, trying to remember where.

Hap was gone and Dan Bozeman was still trying to figure it out when Richler and Weiskopf came in ... and it was the sound of their voices as they got coffee in the squadroom that finally brought it home to him.

“Holy God,” said Lieutenant Bozeman, and got up in a hurry.

 

Both of his parents had offered to cancel their afternoon plans—Monica at the market and Dick golfing with some business people—and stay home with him, but Todd told them he would rather be alone. He thought he would clean his rifle and just sort of think the whole thing over. Try to get it straight in his mind.

“Todd,” Dick said, and suddenly found he had nothing much to say. He supposed if he had been his own father, he would have at this point advised prayer. But the generations had turned, and the Bowdens weren’t much into that these days. “Sometimes these things happen,” he finished lamely, because Todd was still looking at him. “Try not to brood about it.”

“It’ll be all right,” Todd said.

After they were gone, he took some rags and a bottle of Alpaca gun oil out onto the bench beside the roses. He went back into the garage and got the .30-.30. He took it to the bench and broke it down, the dusty-sweet smell of the flowers lingering pleasantly in his nose. He cleaned the gun thoroughly, humming a tune as he did it, sometimes whistling a snatch between his teeth. Then he put the gun together again. He could have done it just as easily in the dark. His mind wandered free. When it came back some five minutes later, he observed that he had loaded the gun. The idea of target-shooting didn’t much appeal, not today, but he had still loaded it. He told himself he didn’t know why.

And that was when the shiny yellow Saab turned into the driveway. The man who got out was vaguely familiar to Todd, but it wasn’t until he slammed the car door and started to walk toward him that Todd saw the sneakers—tow-topped Keds, light blue. Talk about Blasts from the Past; here, walking up the Bowden driveway, was Rubber Ed French, The Ked Man.