When Old Men Die (10 page)

She looked at Dino when she said it, as if he were somehow responsible, but it was the uncles who were to blame if anyone was.
 
Guarding their bodies was bound to take up a lot of a man's time.

We were in the manager's unit of the motel, which was designed to look as if it had been built in the 1950s and hadn't aged since then.
 
It was out past the old Fort Crockett area, down in a sort of depression behind the seawall, and the individual units were square stucco modules on stilts.
 
You couldn't see the stilts from the street, just the tops of the units.
 
We had to enter from a side street that dipped down below the seawall.

"The stilts are for when it rains," Cathy Macklin had told us.
 
"This place can flood in ten minutes if it's raining hard enough.
 
I've had people leave in a panic, but there's nothing to be afraid of.
 
The water never gets more than a few inches deep."

Ms. Macklin was about thirty-five, I thought, though I could have been off by a few years either way.
 
I'm not a good judge of people's ages.
 
She had black hair with only a strand or two of gray in it, a wide mouth, clear skin, and amazingly blue eyes.

I liked the eyes particularly.
 
It was her attitude that bothered me.

"I don't know what you two want," she went on after explaining about how she got the motel in response to our opening conversational gambit.
 
"But then I don't much
care
what you want.
 
I'm really not interested in the sympathy of my father's former associates."

"We weren't exactly his associates," I said.

"Whatever you were.
 
I'm not interested in digging up the past."

I tried to remember whether I'd ever seen her when I was a kid.
 
If I had, she hadn't made any impression.
 
I had better taste now.

"We're sorry about
Braddy
," Dino said. "He was a friend of mine a long time ago, and I liked him.
 
But that's not really why we're here."

Dino looked even more uncomfortable than I felt.
 
He was out of his own environment, and to make matters worse he'd had to ride in the Jeep.
 
As much as I didn't like the job he'd stuck me with, the look on his face when I told him to get in was worth a lot.
 
He'd zipped his blue and white Dallas Cowboy jacket all the way to his chin and put on a pair of sunglasses to give himself that anonymous look.
 
And now he was being forced to sit in a strange room and talk to someone he didn't know.
 
I thought he was doing pretty well so far, however.

"Why are you here, then?" Cathy Macklin asked.

"We think your father's death might be connected to something I'm working on," I told her.
 
"The disappearance of a friend of ours."

She gave me a thoughtful look.
 
I didn't mind.
 
It gave me a chance to stare at those eyes some more.

"What happened to your face?" she asked.

"I ran into a door."

"Oh," she said.
 
"Well, let me tell you something."

I was willing to let her tell me just about anything.
 
I liked her voice, which was a little husky, as if she'd been a smoker at some time in the past.
 

"My father and I didn't see much of one another," she said.
 
"He wasn't really into what they call 'parenting' these days.
 
Even when the gambling closed down, he spent most of his time looking out for a couple of criminals.
 
He didn't have time for me and my mother.
 
As far as we were concerned, he was just someone who came around on birthdays and holidays, and most of the time not even then."

I said, "And you don't care who killed him?"

"He was my father, so I care at least a little, but it's not my job to find out.
 
That's something for the police to worry about.
 
I've got a motel to run."

"Everyone has a job to do," I said.
 
"Mine is to find an old man that's gone missing."

"I don't see what that has to do with me or my father."

"Maybe nothing," I told her.
 
"We'd just like to check it out.
 
If you'll just answer a few questions for us, we won't bother you again."

I didn't add that I'd like to bother her again, but not about her father's murder.
 
I wanted to find out a few more things about her, such as whether she might like to go out with me and whether her eyes were really that blue or if she was wearing colored contact lenses.

"All right," she said.
 
"Ask your questions.
 
And then leave me alone."

I asked her the things that I wanted to know:
 
what her father was doing in The Island Retreat, who he'd been talking to lately, what they had discussed, and whether he knew Outside Harry.

She couldn't help me with anything.
 
She knew who Harry was because she'd seen him on the streets, but she had no idea of who her father associated with or what he'd been up to lately.

"I told you," she said.
 
"My father and I didn't see much of one another.
 
We didn't talk on the phone, we didn't visit.
 
Maybe if he'd needed me for something, I would have gone to him. But he was in good health, he had plenty of money, and he didn't need anyone for anything.
 
Or if he did, it wasn't me that he needed.
 
So I'm afraid I don't have any information that would help you."

"If you think of something, I hope you'll let us know," Dino said.
 
"We really need to find Harry.
 
We're afraid he might wind up dead, like your dad."

"I hope not," she said, as if she might actually care.
 
"But I don't know any more than I've told you."

We thanked her for her time, extended our unwanted sympathy again, and left.

"W
hat do you think?" Dino asked me, as we pulled out of the parking space under the manager's unit.

"I believe her," I said.

"Damn," he said.
 
"So do I."

He was obviously uncomfortable with the wind blowing his hair and pulling at his jacket, but he didn't complain as we drove back to his house.
 
I had to give him credit for that.
 
Still, the look on his face when I stopped at his curb was like you might see on a drowning man who's just discovered that he can breathe under water.
 
It was all he could do to keep from bolting for his front door without even saying good-bye.

"You're gonna keep on looking, right?" he said.

I told him that I was, and he was out of the Jeep and headed down the sidewalk.

"Wait a minute," I said.

He turned around, but he kept edging along the walk toward the door.

"Why don't you give Evelyn a call, ask her if she'd like to go eat with us?
 
We could try one of those fancy restaurants on The Strand."

"Maybe later," he said.
 
"You should be out there looking for Harry.
 
Tonight might be the time to find him."

I could tell that he didn't really believe it, but that was all right.
 
Neither did I.

I
didn't look too hard that night.
 
It was even colder than the night before, and if Harry and Ro-Jo were around they'd be somewhere warmer than the street.
 
There was no need to try The Island Retreat because obviously Ro-Jo had lied to me about Harry's hide-outs, just as he'd lied to someone else.
 
There were plenty of other places Harry could be, but I couldn't look in every vacant building in Galveston.

So after a few passes along the back alleys, I went home and read
Look Homeward, Angel
and listened to my CDs while Nameless slept in my bed.
 
I was at a dead end unless someone came up with something to help me out, and I couldn't figure out who that someone might be.

I couldn't just forget about Harry, however.
 
I was worried about him and what might happen to him.
 
This was all Dino's fault, and even after pulling out my billfold and counting the money Dino had forced on me, I wasn't happy about having taken on the job.
 
If Harry got killed, I was going to feel guilty for a long time, and tomorrow I had to go in and work for Wally
Zintner's
bail bond service.
 
I didn't think Wally would be sympathetic if I asked for time off to do a job for someone else.
 
And Eugene Gant thought
he
had problems.
 
I would've traded places with him in a New York minute.

That night I dreamed I was running in a race.
 
It was an unusual race, since it seemed to have no beginning and no end.
 
I ran all night long, and when I woke up, I was as tired as if the race had been real.

T
he little building where I worked was only a couple of blocks from the police department.
 
Although the owner's name is Wally
Zintner
, the place is called AAA Bail Bonds on the theory that most people generally call the first place they see in the Yellow Pages.
 
A bonding agency named
Zintner's
wouldn't stand a chance.

The outside of the building doesn't look like much.
 
The sign is faded, one of the windows has a long crack that's been patched up with duct tape.
 
The tape's been there for so long that it's tearing along the crack in a place or two.

The inside isn't any better.
 
The walls are cheap paneling, there's no pad under the carpet, which is frayed and stained where people have spilled soft drinks on it, and all the desks have ashtrays that look as if they haven't been emptied in weeks.
 
The smell of smoke is stronger than in the police department.
 
The furnishings consist of four desks and a Coke machine.

There were clerks at three of the four desks.
 
The fourth one was shared between me and Dale Becker,
Zintner's
bounty hunter.
 
We also shared the office computer, though as far as I knew Becker never used it.
 

The clerks -- Betsy Carver, Ronnie
Slane
, Nancy Lamb -- were all smoking.
 
There was already a thin gray cloud gathering near the ceiling.
 
Only Nancy had a client; the others were on the phones.
 
The client, who was also smoking, didn't look happy, but then that wasn't unusual.
 
Hardly any of our clients ever looked happy.
 
Neither would you if you were in the clutches of Wally
Zintner
.

I waved to Nancy and went back into
Zintner's
office, which was really nothing more than a small area set off from the rest of the big main room by a couple of beaverboard partitions.
 
It didn't even have a ceiling.
 
There was room inside for
Zintner
, his chair, a very small desk, and a visitor's chair.
 
There was also room for me if I slid along the beaverboard.

"Hey, Smith,"
Zintner
said when I entered.
 
I didn't have to knock.
 
There wasn't a door.
 
"What happened to your face?"

I was already getting tired of that question.
 
"I cut myself when I was shaving," I said.

"I hate it when that happens.
 
What's going on with you lately?"

He already knew, of course.
 
He always knew what was going on almost as soon as Dino did.
 
Sometimes he knew sooner.

"Why don't you tell me?" I said.

He grinned.
 
He was one of the skinniest men I knew, probably wore a size 24 belt.
 
He always wore tight blue jeans, a pressed white shirt, high-heeled boots, and a black bolo tie with a turquoise pull.
 
Not to mention a belt with a silver buckle in the shape of the state of Texas.
 
He was always complaining about business, but I knew he'd made a pile of money.

"Sit down," he said.
 
"Let's talk over old times."

I preferred to stand.
 
Sitting in the visitor's chair made me feel cramped and trapped.
 
A roach ran out from a hole in the carpet and crossed under the desk.
 
I didn't bother to try to step on it.
 
I figured that it would develop bronchitis and die if it hung around long enough.