Country of Old Men

by Joseph Hansen

  Something was going to have to be done. When Dave pulled open the heavy front door of Max Romano’s to usher Jeff Leppard inside, eleven people stood waiting to be seated, and all the tables were occupied. The small dark bar was crowded, too—and some of the drinkers would be wanting lunch as well.

  “Business,” he grunted to Leppard, as they edged their way through the hopeful, “is getting too damn good.”

  He led the way to his table in its far shadowy corner under a stained-glass window and felt guilty about it. Was he going to have to give up the privilege of always having his own table, which he’d bought the place to keep? Not that the table was the whole story. He’d bought Max’s to hang on to a thousand memories. And to keep the present from vanishing into the past. The place was filled with the ghosts of people he’d loved and lost. Until he joined them in oblivion, he wanted to keep remembering them here.

  “You could refuse service to coloreds,” Leppard said.

  “Or Scandinavians,” Dave said.

  When Leppard’s white wine and Dave’s Dos Equis had come, Leppard said, “We checked out what you said on the phone. It’s a Colt, registered in 1976 to a Herschel Klein, all right. Irwin’s brother. Kosher butcher. When he died in 1981, the widow didn’t know what to do with it, so she kept it. When Irwin told her about the robbery, she said, ‘Take it, the police won’t protect you, protect yourself.’”

  “And he took it”—Dave lit a cigarette—“and now he wishes he hadn’t.”

  “That sounded like a combat move,” Leppard said, “the arm around the throat from behind.”

  “Is Len Gruber a veteran?” Dave said.

  “No record of it,” Leppard said. “But we’ve been assembling another kind of record from around the country.”

  “Brawling?” Dave took warm bread from a basket and buttered it. “Is that why he can’t hold a job? ‘Around the country’? Is that why he has to keep moving on?”

  “You got it,” Leppard said. “He was here in L.A. almost five years, because it’s big, but mostly because they liked Tessa at Shadows.” Leppard nibbled his salad. “After what he did to Zach this time, I hope we find the son of a bitch.”

  “I hope you find Irwin Klein’s gun in his glove compartment,” Dave said, “but I doubt it. Unless you can also find there a better motive for him to kill Cricket than jealousy.”

  “Same as Jordan Vickers’s,” Leppard said. “Motive is not something we’ve really got much of in this case.”

  Dave blinked at him. “Not so far. None of it seems to me to add up. Who really cared enough whether Cricket Shales lived or died to take the risk of killing him?”

  Leppard smiled sourly. “Not much of a risk to date,” he said. “We’re a long way from catching them, whoever they are. I really liked Karen Goddard for it. But you ruined that with your telephone company research.” He looked at Dave sharply. “Just how did you manage that?”

  “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have—”

  “Spare me how cold it was living in those caves.”

  “—you’ll understand there’s nothing secret in this world as long as one living person knows it.”

  “We have access to those records,” Leppard said. “No one else except the subscriber himself is supposed to.”

  Dave said, “Only you didn’t get around to using your legal right, and I did get around to using my shady one.”

  “And we lose Karen Goddard as a suspect.” Leppard hungrily watched the waiter set down a tray on its folding stand and lay plates on the table, murmuring cautions about how hot they were.

  “But we gain a line on the missing gun,” Dave said. “Not on where it is, or on who used it—if anybody used it. We sure as hell didn’t find it at Tomorrow House.” Leppard inhaled steam from his lasagna and sighed with delight. “Damn shame. Vickers was at the apartment complex when Shales was killed.” Leppard picked up his fork and began to eat. “He could easily have put Klein’s lights out and commandeered his gun.”

  “If any of that really happened. It could be a lie.” Dave laid open his sand dabs and lifted out the fragile skeletons. “Klein could have shot Cricket himself.”

  “Vickers said the killer was in his thirties.”

  “Vickers said a lot of things,” Dave said. “If it turns out Len Gruber has the gun, then he’s Plain Vanilla. And I take back my distrust of Vickers. If not—”

  A big figure loomed at the table. Dave looked up. It was Cliff Callahan. His face was anguished. He gave Leppard a nod. “Lieutenant?” He sat down and said to Dave, “I’m sorry to intrude, but I’m in deep trouble.”

  “About that whirlybird wedding?” Dave said.

  “You’ve got it. Amanda isn’t speaking to me. She’s really boiled. And I didn’t do it, Dave. I swear.”

  “Then how did the studio publicity department find out? You and Amanda, Cecil and I were the only people who knew, and it wasn’t me.”

  “What about Cecil?” Callahan said. “He’s a reporter.”

  Dave said, “He’d never violate a personal confidence.”

  “No,” Callahan said sheepishly. “I didn’t think so.”

  “I never saw your names linked in the paper, or on television. You didn’t go to Beverly Hills parties or charity balls together. But you did go out now and then, didn’t you—restaurants, theatres, movies? And you’re too big to hide behind a pair of dark glasses.”

  “Sure, we went out, but not to celebrity places.”

  “Anyplace a celebrity goes is a celebrity place,” Dave said. “Some free-lance reporter scented a romance, and began keeping an eye on the two of you. When you came breezing out of the Hall of Records, a quick word with the clerk would have been all they needed.”

  Callahan’s bulky muscles relaxed a little. He ventured a hopeful smile. “Will you please tell that to Amanda?”

  “If you’re going to be married,” Dave said, “it seems to me she ought to learn to take your word for these things.”

  “We’re still new to each other,” Callahan said. “I don’t blame her for not wanting to make a clown act out of her wedding—our wedding. I just wish she’d stop thinking because I’m an actor I’d trash her feelings just to satisfy my stupid ego. It’s not true, damn it.”

  “She worries about making a mistake,” Dave said. “She’s almost done that more than once. Don’t take it personally.”

  “You’ll talk to her?” Callahan was urgent.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Dave said. “Now have some lunch.”

  “Thanks, but”—Callahan rose, looking at his watch—“I’ve used up my time. Have to get back to work.” On his way out, people crowded around him, asking for autographs.

  Watching, Leppard said, “If you don’t look out, this will turn into a celebrity place. Then how will you handle the crowds?”

  15

  HE WOKE AT THREE-THIRTY and showered, making the spray very hot in the hope of soaking out what remained of the ache in his joints. He put on worn jeans and an old cambric shirt, and crossed to the cookshack. The oven needed cleaning. He tied on a long red wraparound apron, and was squatting to get spray can, sponges, latex gloves from under the sink, when knuckles rattled the screen door. He stood up, squinting. He couldn’t make out whose shadow was cast by the westering sun on the screen.

  “Samuels.” The pale detective came in. “We got word while Leppard was at lunch. Deputies in Contra Costa County saw a man stealing license plates off a pickup truck on a country road at five this morning. Guess who he was.”

  “Len Gruber,” Dave said.

  “He and Tessa are on their way from the airport now. The lieutenant figured you might like to come downtown.”

  “Stealing license plates?”

  “To put on his Toyota to throw the police forces of eleven western states and Canada into confusion.”

  “The gun,” Dave said. “Did he have the gun?”

  “They didn’t find one—not on him, not hidden in the car, not i
n their luggage. He says he never had a gun, so how could he throw it away? They questioned Tessa separately—no conflict.”

  “Zach didn’t see any gun.” Glumly Dave shed the apron, laid it over a chair back. “I asked him at Madge Dunstan’s.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Samuels said. “We’ll zap Len for beating Zach up. And Tessa for not reporting him. And both of them for stranding their child on the coast road.”

  “I sure as hell hope so.” A blue lightweight windbreaker hung by the door. He took it down and shrugged into it. “What about Klein?”

  “There’s nothing to hold him on,” Samuels said. “Until we have brother Herschel’s revolver, we won’t know whether it was the one used on Shales, either, will we? While he was with Leppard at the department, I took a team and went over his place, house, garage, yard. We didn’t find any gun.”

  They left the cookshack. Dave pulled the door shut. They headed for the road. “I’d say Klein probably had the best motive of anybody in this case. Shales had corrupted his only child, ruined her life, alienated her from her family.” Samuels opened the door of an unmarked city car for Dave, and he eased himself stiffly into the seat. “The man hated Shales, and here was a chance to get back at him. His attitude these days is that his life is over. Maybe he figured he had nothing to lose.” Samuels got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door. Dave asked, “Did your team find a flight jacket in his closet?”

  “I didn’t ask them,” Samuels said.

  “Ask them,” Dave said. “Just for me.”

  Len Gruber didn’t look cocky anymore. He looked seedy and hopeless in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit. And as sore at fate as a man his age could look. A public defender sat beside him in the interrogation room, Ruben Goetz, a plump young man in a cheap gray lightweight suit. He had rigged fasteners for his attaché case from Velcro—someone had broken the brass latches. Leppard stood against the interrogation room wall again, in shirtsleeves again, arms folded across his sturdy chest again.

  “You went out looking for Zach this last time,” he said. “When he crept out to try to find Toyland School by himself. Why didn’t you go looking for him the night of the shooting?”

  “I told you,” Gruber said, “I was asleep, zonked.”

  “That’s what you said,” Leppard agreed, “but maybe you were mistaken. Maybe you remembered it wrong. Maybe there was a commercial break in the TV show you were watching, and you got up to go to the bathroom, and you looked into his room and he wasn’t in his bed. Tessa would chew you out when she got home from work and he wasn’t there—so you went looking for him. What time did this happen?”

  “It never happened,” Gruber said. He looked at Goetz. “Do I have to answer this garbage?”

  Goetz said to Leppard, “He doesn’t have to answer.”

  “Damn it, Rube, I need witnesses to the Shales shooting,” Leppard told him. “I’ve got next to nothing to go on there. I need somebody who got a good look at the shooter.” He took hold of the chair back where his jacket hung, leaned over the chair, put his face close to Gruber’s, and shouted, “What time did you go out looking for Zach that night?”

  Gruber sat and sulked. Finally he looked up. “If I tell you what happened that night, what will it get me?”

  “It won’t get you off for beating your child,” Leppard said. “We don’t plea-bargain child abuse.”

  Dave cleared his throat. Leppard stepped to him, bent over him, listened while Dave whispered in his ear. Leppard frowned to himself for a minute, stroking the white streak in his hair, then nodded, straightened, turned back to Gruber. “We could probably do something for Tessa,” he said. “Jail is no place for a beautiful woman like Tessa.”

  “What about Zach?” Gruber said.

  “What about him? He’ll go to foster care, someplace they know the difference between a child and a punching bag.”

  “Don’t be intemperate, Lieutenant,” Goetz said. “Nothing’s been proven yet.”

  Leppard said, “I apologize, Counselor.” He looked at the sullen Gruber again. “The county likes children to be with their own parents if possible,” he said. “As Mr. Goetz says, nothing’s been proven against you, yet. Maybe Zach had another one of his famous accidents. Maybe he got out of the car at that filling station to play hide-and-seek with you, and you didn’t miss him till you’d driven all the way to Contra Costa County.” Leppard smiled. Dave was glad the smile was not directed at him. Leppard said, “Maybe the judge will send you and Tessa and Zach to Disneyland for a week, all expenses paid, as a model young American family.” Then his vein of humor ran out. He became a menace again, bent into Gruber’s face again, and asked, “Now tell me about the man who shot Cricket Shales.”

  “I didn’t go out to look for Zach. Like I told you, I was in bed asleep. The gunshots woke me up. That was when I went out. We ain’t right over it, but some way our bedroom gets the noise from the swimming pool—late parties, drunks, diving board banging, splashes in the water. Pain in the ass. I was sure these shots come from that direction. And I headed that way, and down the stairs. And I seen this guy crouching down in the pool. It’s empty, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “In the corner, at the deep end, like he was hiding. I heard somebody running away.” He peered up at Leppard. “Must have been that Ruby Fine, right?”

  “Rachel Klein,” Goetz said.

  “With your little son,” Leppard said.

  “I didn’t hear him,” Gruber protested.

  “He was barefoot,” Dave said.

  Leppard said, “Forget that for now. What about the man in the pool? Did he have a gun?”

  “Yeah, he had a gun.” Gruber barked a laugh. “Damn right. He seen me, too. I ducked back up the stairs before he could blow me away. You better believe it.”

  “Describe him,” Leppard said.

  “White guy, around my age”—Gruber moved his shoulders, wrinkled his brow—“what can I tell you? He looked like anybody. The light was bad. They don’t maintain the ground lights around that complex worth shit. He was down in the shadows. And I only seen him for a split second. Soon as he heard me and turned to look, I cut out.”

  “What was he wearing?” Leppard said.

  “One of them leather flight jackets,” Gruber said. For a moment his eyes went dreamy. “Damn, I sure would like to own one of those. But they cost a bundle.” He focused on Leppard again. “You going to get Tessa off? She didn’t do nothing wrong. Hell, she cried when I said we couldn’t look for Zach at that filling station, we had to get out of there. She cried and bitched at me for miles to turn back and find fucking Zach. I finally had to hit her to shut her up.”

  Goetz winced. “Don’t say things like that.”

  “What did I say?” Gruber asked him blankly.

  Supper was chicken Marsala and asparagus tips. Dave set the plates on the table, switched on the television set, and sat down across from Cecil, who was smiling over his plate and tucking a red napkin in at his collar. “Super,” he said, and then looked at the television screen because Dot Yamada, the Channel Three news anchor, spoke his name. “And now here is Cecil Harris in an exclusive interview with renowned Los Angeles drug counselor Jordan Vickers.” And there were Cecil and Vickers seated facing each other behind the news desk.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dave said.

  The on-screen Cecil was talking about the murder of pop guitarist, drug dealer, ex-convict Cricket Shales—the photo shown was a blurry snapshot—sketching in the background quickly. The real Cecil held his fork poised over his plate and looked at Dave surprised. “What’s the matter?”

  The on-screen Cecil said, “At his famous rehabilitation center for drug addicts, Tomorrow House”—file film of Tomorrow House—“Jordan Vickers was instrumental in the recovery of Cricket Shales’s onetime girlfriend Rachel Klein, whom Shales had introduced to drugs.” Footage of Rachel Klein with arresting officers. “Ms. Klein was for a time held by police for Shales’s murder, but those c
harges have now been dropped, in part as a result of Mr. Vickers’s testimony.” He turned from looking into the camera to ask Vickers, “Can you tell us what it was you told the police?”

  The camera pulled back for a two-shot. Vickers was self-possessed, serious. “That I received a telephone tip on the night of the murder that Cricket Shales might be attempting to contact Rachel Klein at her apartment. I wanted to prevent that if I could.”

  “And when you got to the apartment, what happened?”

  “I saw two men fighting in the patio.”

  “Two men?” Cecil said. “And then what happened?”

  “There were gunshots.” Vickers gave a wry smile. “I made myself scarce after that.”

  “But you can say that it was not Rachel Klein who killed Cricket Shales, but some man. You told me earlier that he was in his thirties. Were you able to identify him?”

  “It was too dark,” Vickers said. “It was midnight.”

  “Suppose you saw him again?” Cecil said.

  Vickers shrugged. “I might recognize him.”

  Dave jumped up and switched off the television set. He stared at Cecil, unbelieving. “How could you?”

  “What do you mean? Councilman Hernandez brought him to the studio. Said you’d cleared it when he talked to you at the house.”

  “Cleared—?” Dave laughed. “You didn’t believe him.”

  “He seemed surprised you hadn’t told me.”

  “I’m surprised he knew who you were,” Dave said. “He didn’t give me a hint.”

  “Me either,” Cecil said. “I’d have said he thought I was the houseboy. Anyway”—he smiled apologetically—“to tell you the truth, I didn’t see how you had any right to clear anything. So after Hernandez left, I put Vickers in a dressing room with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and I called Leppard. And he said Vickers is under suspicion, but there’s no evidence to hold him. I checked with the district attorney’s office, and they haven’t even heard this part of Vickers’s testimony. They certainly haven’t muzzled him. So Vickers is free to say whatever he wants. Right?”