The Old Dick

by L. A. Morse

  “The problem is, we’ve got so goddamn little to go on,” I said. “We’ve got a Mutt and Jeff pair, is all. Mutt is short, with a funny voice, maybe young, who reminds you of a psychopath who’s been dead over forty years. Jeff could maybe be muscle who’s a pro with a sap. Maybe they’re a regular team, maybe it was a one-shot deal. Maybe they’re in business locally and are known, but maybe they’re imports. Maybe they’re working for themselves, maybe for someone else. Maybe some cops could recognize the description, but maybe not. And anyway, I don’t know any cops anymore, and even if I did, I’d have a hard time getting any info unless I explained why, which we both think isn’t such a swell idea.”

  “Hey, Jake, you see? You’re getting into it.”

  “Oh, yeah. Lot of progress. Nothing but maybes. So far I’ve got it cut down to anyone in North America. And even that’s not necessarily right. What I need is something else, something to focus it a little. You haven’t remembered that thing you were trying to think of?”

  “No. Shit, it’s been so close I’ve almost had it, but I can’t bring it in. I keep trying to get at it, you know, but it keeps moving away.”

  “Well, I told you, don’t fight it. Maybe—shit, another fucking maybe—it’ll pop into your head when you don’t expect it.”

  I paused, trying to figure what to ask next, trying to remember what I used to do, trying to visualize myself talking to a client, eliciting information and inspiring confidence. Oh, I was confidence-inspiring, all right, sitting in my kitchen filled with week-old dirty dishes, barefoot, in faded striped pajamas that years ago had lost the fly buttons. The scene could have served as an advertisement for euthanasia: “Before it gets this bad... do the thoughtful thing. They’ll thank you for it.”

  I finally managed to come up with something. “Who knew about this?”

  “No one. Only you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What about Eric?”

  “Who?”

  “Eric. Isn’t that your driver’s name?”

  “Jesus! What’s the matter with me? Of course it is.” He sounded embarrassed. “Sorry, Jake. I haven’t been to sleep. I must be getting punchy.”

  “Aren’t we all. Look, just a couple more questions, then I think you should try to get some rest.”

  “I’ll be okay. I’ll rest when I get Tommy back. Anyway, Eric couldn’t be involved. He doesn’t know anything, nothing. I’m positive.”

  “Okay. Anybody else? To put together that much money in cash must’ve taken a while.”

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “Well, did anyone get curious or start to ask questions or seem too interested?”

  Sal gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah, nearly everyone. Fucking bank managers. Dying to know what was going on. But I was careful, moved around enough. Sorry, Jake. I really don’t think anything’s there. Besides, no matter what happened while I was getting the money, I was the only one who knew where the drop was to be made. I didn’t tell anyone, remember, not even you until we were on the way. And whoever it was, was waiting for us, so it couldn’t have happened on this end.”

  Damn.

  He was absolutely right, of course. The joker had to come from the kidnappers’ side, no question. It was completely obvious, and I’d missed it. Great. That kind of dazzling acumen really boded well for my investigation.

  “I must be pretty punchy, too,” I said. “So there’s no help there, knowing where the connection was,’ since we’ve got no line at all on the creeps who grabbed Tommy.”

  “Nothing.”

  “No surprise.” I sighed heavily. “Look, I can’t think right now. I’ve got to get a little more rest before I can figure out what to do. Besides, I think my ear’s gone numb from this damn telephone.”

  “Yeah, mine, too.”

  I told Sal I’d get back to him. He said that might be a problem, since he was going out of town as soon as possible to see if he could raise some money, but he gave me the number of an answering service where I could always get a message through to him.

  “Okay, Sal,” I said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Jake. You too.”

  “Buddy, you’re the one who needs it, especially with me working for you. You’re really sure you want me to do this?”

  “Don’t start again. I’m sure. And look, I intend to pay you for this.”

  “No, you won’t. You paid me last night, and I don’t figure I’ve earned it yet.”

  “But—”

  I hung up. It was the only way I could keep Sal from having his own way. What a goddamn stubborn, persuasive son of a bitch. I felt a little bit sorry for whoever he was going to try to screw money out of.

  No, I didn’t. If he succeeded, that meant it wouldn’t be so disastrous when I failed. If I failed, I corrected. Be a little more positive, I tried to tell myself; there was always a chance.

  Yeah, and there was always a chance I’d be wintering in the south of France.

  A scalding shower, long enough to empty the hot water heater, had me feeling almost human. Not necessarily a shining example, but at least a member of the species.

  I lay on top of the bed, trying not to think about what the hell I was doing. If the consequences weren’t so damn grave, it’d be ludicrous. But then, the most serious things often were. The key was to act as though you didn’t realize it.

  The key was to act. The problem was, I couldn’t see how. I wished I felt I had a better grip on this. I couldn’t understand; it all still felt so vague, fuzzy, like I was seeing it from a great distance. All shadows. I had to manage somehow to give them substance.

  I went over everything I knew, all I had to go on. That filled up the two minutes it took for me to go back to sleep.

  Only to be awakened two hours later by another fucking phone call. Just as well. If I got too much sleep, I might start to feel good. I was limbering up, though. It only took nine rings for me to reach it this time.

  “This better be good,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “Oh, Sal. Sorry. What is it? Where are you?”

  “I’m still at home. Jake, I’ve got it.”

  “What?”

  “What I was trying to remember. A—M—seven.”

  “Huh?”

  “A—M—seven. That’s part of the license number.”

  Part of the license number? Could this really be happening?

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “No shit, Jake.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Or at least I think I am. You remember how I said that when I turned around, just before they slugged me, I spotted something I wanted to remember?”

  “Yeah. Go on.”

  “I kept trying to visualize it in my mind. Tried to see myself turning around and noticing something, but I couldn’t figure out what, couldn’t see it. Only knew I kept saying, ‘I am seventy-five.’ “

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I decided, after all, that I’d better get some rest before I started. Maybe for the first time I wasn’t thinking about what I couldn’t remember, wasn’t pulling at it, you know, and just as I was going to sleep, the whole thing popped into my head, clear as anything. I saw myself turning around and then seeing that their car was at enough of an angle that I could make out the plate. I couldn’t see the whole thing. The first letter and the last two numbers were covered with dirt, or something, but I could see the center of it. A—M—7. I remember I was kind of surprised, but I knew I had to do something to remember. That’s why I kept saying to myself, ‘I am seventy-five.’ I figured if I could remember repeating that, I’d be able to get back to the thing that made me say it in the first place. And it worked. How about that?”

  How about it? A partial license. Shit.

  But why not? As a cop I’d known used to say, “In the Land of the Bizarre, the improbable is to be expected.” Since yesterday, I’d clearly become an inhabitant of that country.

&
nbsp; “Was it a California plate?”

  “Yeah. Yellow on black. This’ll help won’t it?”

  “Maybe, Sal. Just one more maybe. But you put together enough maybes, and maybe you’ll have something. In any event, that was smart, Sal, real quick thinking. I hope I can start to react as well. There isn’t anything else, is there? No more mental itches?”

  “No. I’m pretty positive that’s all there is.”

  “Then it’ll have to do.” I paused. “You know the chances are that this’ll come to nothing.”

  “I know that.”

  “But I’ll follow it.”

  “I know that, too. Look, Jake, you be sure to let me know what’s going on, through that answering service I gave you. Okay? Even if there’s nothing, I want to know.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll keep you posted. And for whatever it’s worth, try not to worry about the rest of it, at least not too much. Things can still happen. The score’s against us, but we’re not out of it yet.”

  Jesus. I was surprised I didn’t say, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” or “Let’s win one for the Gipper.” My brain must’ve been turning to oatmeal.

  “Yeah. Right.” It sounded like Sal believed me about as much as I did.

  I hung up. I stood staring out the window into my backyard, shaking my head.

  It wasn’t a matchbook from Flo’s Cantina, but it was something. Damn.

  It looked like some kind of blight had hit my tomato plants.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I was working, I’d known people all over, in all kinds of jobs. Newspapers, show business, real estate, investment, insurance, police, and in most departments of the city, county, and state governments. It went with being a P.I. In fact, to a large extent it was the job. You didn’t so much discover anything as locate the person who already knew it. Then, for a lunch or a sawbuck or a little bit of sweet talk or maybe a favor in return, you became a hero and a genius to your client. It wasn’t always that easy, but for a lot of my work, I’d figured I was never more than three or four phone calls away from getting anything I needed.

  But, as I’d told Sal, that was a long time ago. All of my connections, acquaintances, and friends who’d had useful positions had long since ceased to occupy them. They’d moved or retired. Or worse.

  My once-full address book had more cross-outs than a bowdlerized version of Henry Miller. Hell, whole sections of the alphabet were now nothing but deletions. At times it seemed nonstop, the dying of friends.

  Still, I did know some people who weren’t yet under the ground, and the principle hadn’t changed. If you wanted information, you went to the people who had it. If my friends no longer had access to it, maybe they had kids who did. The strings were different, but some of them could still be pulled.

  Or so I hoped, as I headed toward the west Valley for the second time in about twelve hours. This wasn’t one of my favorite parts of the city. For most of my life there’d been little out here. But it had mushroomed like a boom town during the golden days of the aerospace and electronics industries, and then nearly died when the bottom fell out. Now it was just another suburb on a freeway, built at a time before the Arabs made long commutes a luxury rather than an inconvenience. Maybe it was just the association with the moon shots, but I’d always felt that it was a vaguely lunar landscape out here, desolate, arid, capable of sustaining life only in carefully contrived artificial environments.

  One of those environments was a place called Sunset Grove. Treeless and without a view, Sunset Grove was a nursing home. It was a one-story building, U-shaped around a grass courtyard. With its jarringly colored doors and trim, it looked like nothing so much as a tacky motel. Which was hardly surprising, since it was owned and operated by the same corporation that ran a nationwide chain of tacky motels. It was obviously good business for them. If they didn’t get you on the road, they’d get you at the end of it.

  Actually, considering the horror stories that were told about nursing homes—physical abuse, drug-induced stupors to ensure tranquility for the staff, weekly showers for which the patients were all stripped and put in a room together to be literally hosed down, places where five or ten patients were made to share one set of dentures, and so on—Sunset Grove was not that bad. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it wasn’t Dachau either. It was reasonably well run, competently staffed, clean. You could tell it was a good home because there were displays of plastic flowers in every room.

  Patrick O’Brien had been there for about four years. Statistically, that was better than average, since a third of the people entering nursing homes died within the first year, and another third within the next three. Those numbers weren’t encouraging; but then, nothing about nursing homes was. The gate in the walls surrounding Sunset Grove didn’t need a sign telling all who entered to abandon hope. Hope just naturally disappeared once you were inside. Before you went in, you had already given up your health, home, and nearly everything else that had ever meant anything. There was only one more thing to give up, and even relatively decent places like Sunset Grove didn’t provide much reason to hold onto it. Everyone there knew this was probably to be the last stop. It couldn’t have boosted the spirits to realize that this Stop would be made at a place that looked like it belonged next to Route 66 in Oklahoma.

  No, no one chose to go to Sunset Grove; you went there because you didn’t have any choice. Patrick O’Brien hadn’t. He’d known it, as did everyone else, though no one was happy about it.

  His had been an almost classically bad retirement. When he left the force after his thirty years he was still only in his fifties, before he retired, he’d looked forward to doing nothing, but he soon discovered that for some people, doing nothing was the hardest possible activity. Then, he figured he’d supplement his pension with a job, but the opportunities available weren’t that great. As he got older, they got even fewer and less meaningful, and then nonexistent.

  He had plenty of time on his hands and nothing to fill it with. A lot of men who retire discover that their hobbies, which were fine as hobbies when they were working, make lousy careers when they stop. That was especially true for O’Brien, whose only real hobby had been drinking.

  The whole thing was as clear as it was inevitable. He drove himself crazy, then he drove his wife crazy, then they drove each other crazy. Bitterness led to anger led to depression, and then the whole thing started over again. Until Maggie, his wife, must’ve decided she’d had enough and broke the circle by dying of a cancer that appeared out of nowhere and killed her in six weeks.

  O’Brien’s steady deterioration after that was as predictable as everything else. If you felt really rotten about yourself, it eventually caught up with you. Having enjoyed ridiculously good health all his life, his body started to fall apart. Nothing really serious, just enough little things to make it increasingly difficult for him to look after himself. He knew better than to move in with his son’s family. So that meant Sunset Grove, whose glossy little brochures said it was “a graceful retreat.”

  Yeah, and so was Dunkirk.

  The only thing at all out of the ordinary in this whole sequence was that O’Brien wasn’t one of those who packed it in during the first year. In fact, soon after he entered Sunset Grove he started to pick right up. I don’t know what it was, but something in the place got to him. Maybe it was the essential hypocrisy of places like this. Maybe the smiling condescension offended him. Maybe the perpetual, unthinking, mindless, mirthless cheerfulness touched his dark, Irish temper. Whatever it was, Sunset Grove reawakened the outraged, bristling anger that had been the dominant emotion of his life, and with it came renewed vitality. After about fifteen years of aimlessness, he again had a purpose: to make life as difficult as possible for all the smiling, mealy-mouthed bastards who surrounded him. He was not going to take any shit. He was not going to go gentle... anywhere.

  And he thrived, like those couples whose relationships were endless raging battles but who would be lost wi
thout the conflict. O’Brien, who had spent thirty years kicking the asses of slimy punks, had a new opponent: the world—or Sunset Grove, anyway, which was as much of it as he still had contact with.

  I’d been glad to see the change, because Patrick O’Brien and I went way back, to the days when he’d had a beat in Boyle Heights and I’d had a one-and-a-half-room office behind Pershing Square that said “J. Spanner and Associates” on the door. The associates, I supposed, were the wide variety of insects and small furry creatures with whom I shared the space. Hell, I was fairly young and thought a name like that would be more impressive. Than what, I didn’t know. When business got good enough so I could change offices, I left the associates—literal and figurative—behind.

  O’Brien spent his whole career as a patrolman. Unlike most cops who never advanced, it wasn’t owing to a lack of ability or brains. Rather, he never thought his six-two, two-forty body would fit very comfortably behind a desk, and he never wanted to do the ass-kissing he figured was necessary to get out of his uniform. For a cop, he’d had a curious dislike of authority, something he might have inherited from his Molly Maguire grandfather.

  For obvious reasons, Patrick O’Brien was never known as Pat, always just O’Brien or, sometimes, O’Bee. Whereas his Hollywood namesake appeared gruff but kindly, O’Bee tended to be foul and nasty. I liked him a lot.

  I parked the car, and spotted O’Brien sitting on a lawn chair under an umbrella, apart from everyone else, glowering at the eight-foot wall that kept the world from intruding into Sunset Grove—or vice versa. I walked across the grass to him. It had been several months since I’d seen him, and as I got close, I was shocked at how bad he looked. He’d always been fat, but it had been hard, solid flesh, appropriate to his roaring, expansive personality. Now the tension seemed gone, and there was just soft weight there, not strength. His full head of wavy hair—which for years had utterly pissed me off—was no longer an angry auburn, but more a dull brown. I didn’t like what I saw.

  “Hey, O’Bee,” I said, “you’re looking well.”