Country of Old Men

by Joseph Hansen

  “You was at Tomorrow House the other morning.”

  Dave blinked at him. “That’s right. You came out of the stable. You’re the carpenter, right?”

  “There’s always plenty to do.” The boy stood up, wiped a hand on his pants, held the hand out. Dave shook it. The boy said, “That old house is falling apart. I’m Noah.”

  “He built the ark,” Dave said. “Is that why Vickers made you carpenter? Because of your name?”

  “I had a little experience before I got on drugs. My old man was a carpenter. Time I was eleven or so, he’d take me with him on his jobs. He’d drink. I’d work.”

  Cecil brought coffee and filled Dave’s mug. He put a light kiss on the black-and-blue mark. “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live.” Dave sat down. “Any phone calls?”

  “No, but there will be. Soon as Amanda sees this.” The Times lay on the table, the front page of the Calendar section. Cecil tapped a headline story with a long finger. Dave said to Noah, “Excuse me a minute,” put on his reading glasses, peered. Cliff Callahan To Marry Wealthy Beverly Hills Decorator. Ceremony will be aboard Icarus, famous brainy helicopter. He snatched the glasses off and looked up at Cecil. “She’ll kill him,” he said.

  “The understanding was”—Cecil returned to the stove and loaded plates there—“the studio wasn’t to know a thing about it till it was all over. I thought Callahan was smart—at least for an actor. He’s done a stupid thing.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Dave said.

  “Then how did they find out?” Cecil brought plates of ham and eggs and toast to the table. Noah had pulled the paper around so he could read it. He slid it aside so Cecil could put down his breakfast. He said:

  “You know him?” He was awed. “He a friend of yours?”

  “The bride-to-be,” Dave said, “we’ve known for a long time. How long we’ll know Callahan remains to be seen.”

  Noah whistled, eyes round. “Wow!” he said. “We watch that show every week at the halfway house.”

  Cecil sat down. “Eat it before it gets cold.”

  Noah pitched in. Dave looked at the paper again. “Typical. They mean to exploit it for all it’s worth. Photos in every magazine the world around.” He put his glasses away and picked up knife and fork. “What a circus. Cliff must have trusted somebody on the set. And old trustworthy ran straight to the publicity department.”

  “I hope that whoever leaked it admits it to Amanda. Because she isn’t going to like it. She is not that kind of lady. Getting married in a helicopter jammed with camera crews, hovering over Universal Studios, ten thousand screaming fans milling around below? No way.”

  Dave smeared guava jelly on toast. “If Cliff can’t convince her it wasn’t his fault, I’m afraid no amount of computer magic can make that marriage happen.” He felt bad about it. Pretty and bright as she was, her success had kept getting in Amanda’s way when it came to men. Dave thought Callahan honestly wanted her for herself alone. He’d been pleased. “Or maybe she’ll surprise us. She loves him. Maybe she’ll laugh and go along with the glitz.”

  Noah said, “Excuse me, but what time is it?”

  Cecil read his bulky black watch. “Nine-thirty-five.”

  “Jesus.” The ponytailed boy let the fork rattle onto his empty plate. “I’ve got to go.” He stood up. “Listen, Mr. Brandstetter, why I came was—Mr. Vickers lied to you. It makes me feel rotten to say it and I been putting it off. But it’s murder we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”

  “It’s murder,” Dave said. “Lied to me? About what?”

  “Those back steps gotta be replaced. I was outside measuring them,” Noah said, “when you asked him where he was that night, and he said he was working at his desk.”

  “And he wasn’t working at his desk?” Dave said.

  “He was out all evening. Reason I know is, it was the night we have our private talk. Always. Once a week. Six-thirty, right after dinner. Only when I went back there, he was going out, and he apologized and said something had come up and he had to see somebody. And we’d reschedule our conference another day, okay?” The boy looked miserable. “God, I feel like Judas or something.”

  “You don’t know what time he came back?”

  “Heard his car. I got no watch, but it was after the church clock up the street went midnight.”

  11

  IT WOULD TAKE CECIL half an hour to drive in his blue, flame-painted van, rock music throbbing on the stereo, to the television studio over by Dodger Stadium. Dave didn’t go back to bed as Cecil had asked him to. He sat in the cookshack, drinking coffee, reading the Times, looking often at his watch. Then he again unplugged the phones Cecil had so methodically reconnected—“I want to be able to find out how you are”—limped out, and climbed painfully into the Jaguar.

  He drove south through Venice on his way to Tomorrow House. But when he passed the flat-roofed green stucco buildings of Toyland School, he slowed, peered in the side mirror, made a U-turn. He parked at the curb and got out of the car. Sounds of high-pitched little voices singing came to him. He crossed that very clean sidewalk, opened the gate in the wire-mesh fence, and doors burst open and small children came tumbling out, hopping, chirping. After them came a placidly smiling grandmotherly woman in a smock, and after her Celia Yamashita, a child clinging to her hand.

  The children began climbing the jungle gym, tunneling through the barrel, piling into and out of the cars of the little engine that couldn’t. Dave closed the gate carefully. The old woman looked at him, cocking her head, frowning. A question on her lips, she took a step toward him, clean white tennis shoes crunching the gravel. Then Celia Yamashita saw him and spoke to her, and she managed a smile for Dave, and turned away to look after the children, one of whom had started to wail. Celia Yamashita came to him.

  “I don’t see Zach Gruber,” Dave said.

  “His parents withdrew him,” she said. “They didn’t like it that I’d believed he’d been beaten at home. They said they’d find another school to send him, someplace that would treat them with respect.” She blinked at Dave through her blue-rimmed glasses. Worriedly. “Who’s been abusing you?”

  He smiled thinly. “I have my prepared explanations, too. I fell down stairs. Will that do, or must I see the doctor?”

  She wasn’t in a mood for jokes. “The elderly suffer from abuse at home, too, you know. Spouses, grown children, caretakers—” Then she must have seen a warning in Dave’s face, because she shut her mouth, blushed redly, and held out a hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “I appreciate your concern,” he said stiffly, “but it wasn’t anything like that.” He turned away. “Where did they put Zach, do you know?”

  “No, but they’re feckless. I doubt they’ve found a place yet. He’s probably at home.”

  “I’d like it better if he wasn’t.” He opened the gate.

  She was with him. “So would I. See if you can make them change their minds, will you please?”

  Tomorrow House would have to wait. Dave drove up into West Hollywood, parked, and hobbled into the courtyard of the brown stucco apartment complex again. No one was around. They’d set off for work a couple of hours ago, hadn’t they? Those that worked. Not Len Gruber. Dave climbed to the gallery and walked along it, among the fake soccer balls and plastic tricycles, to the Grubers’ door and pressed the button. The door was flimsy, and it surprised him a little not to hear the television set through it. Len should be watching his cop shows, no? He waited a beat, then thumbed the buzzer again. Nobody came. The window curtains were drawn so he couldn’t look inside. Well, maybe they were out hunting for a school for Zach.

  He started back along the gallery and halted. At about the spot Zach had pointed to, the spot where he’d been that night in his grimy little T-shirt and briefs when he heard the shots that had killed his idol Cricket. He studied his watch, then started, as quickly as he could manage, for the stairs, down the stairs, toward the rear patio, and
to the place where Zach had stopped and seen Rachel bending over the dead man, the gun in her hand. He looked at his watch. Twenty-two seconds. He grimaced. He was crippled this morning, but even in good shape he’d not have covered the distance as quickly as Zach’s anxious little legs.

  Now he walked into the breezeway and stopped beside the fading chalk outline of the guitarist’s body. He turned slowly, taking in everything he could see from here. He walked into the patio with the dry swimming pool. In the cool shadow of the shaggy leaning pine he turned around again, looking. A narrow walkway went out to an alley. He followed it. Cars could park here, in marked places, under the floor of second-story apartments. Rachel’s apartment number was painted on the wall. She’d have come this way, then.

  He went back to the chalk mark. When the killer heard her coming, where had he run to? Dave’s eyes lit on the storage locker, the one Zach had found so easy to open and crawl into the other day. Dave drew out the loosened screws of the hasp, as Zach must have done, pulled open the doors. Empty. He put his head inside for a closer look. And there it was. A large blue-and-white jogging shoe.

  He stretched a sore arm for it. It was stuck. Wincing at the pain, he tugged the shoe, wiggled it, and it came away. A flange of rubber sole at the heel had lodged under an upright backing board of the locker. The wearer had been in too much of a hurry to try to free it. He’d pulled his foot out of it and run away.

  As Dave stood studying the shoe, turning it over in his hands, Zach piped in his mind, There’s lots of good hiding places. There had only needed to be one, hadn’t there? And close at hand. Reachable in seconds from the place where Jordan Vickers had shot Cricket Shales to keep him from meeting Rachel Klein again. While unseen by him, Rachel bent horrified above the murdered man’s body, Vickers had crouched in here, heart hammering, praying for whoever it was to go away—for just the short time he’d need to make his escape.

  Dave closed the locker and headed for Tomorrow House.

  When the gap-toothed girl let him in the front door, it struck Dave that he’d come in vain, that Vickers would of course be downtown this morning, trying to help Rachel. Word of her arrest would have been on the TV news. But no—Vickers, shaved skull gleaming, was bending above the steel folding chair of one of his scruffy dependents in the big room to the left of the front hallway. The chairs stood in a ragged circle again. And seven or eight of them were occupied. But this particular child-woman, a baby in her arms, was getting all the attention. Everyone leaned toward her. And she clutched the baby as if they meant to snatch it away, and her eyes were wide and imploring. “No, no,” she wept, “I won’t, I promise I won’t, I swear it. Never again.”

  “You jivin’ us,” a black young woman scoffed.

  “Jou are lying to jourself.” A breasty Latino girl blinked angry eyes. “Jou got to stop that. Ees no good.”

  The girl wailed, “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “If you couldn’t help yourself,” Vickers said, “who could help you?”

  “You,” the girl cried up at him, “you have to—”

  “You are the answer,” Vickers said. “You, baby. You are the one that has to say, ‘I don’t do cocaine anymore. Shooting up is bad for me. If I don’t stop’”—he glanced across the room and saw Dave standing in the doorway—“‘I’ll get busted again, I’ll lose my baby, I’ll get AIDS, or all three.’” He patted her shoulder. “I have to go now.” He freed himself from her hand that clung to his arm. “Tell her what she has to do, who she has to be, who she has to respect.” He smiled gravely at them all, and came away. “I’ll be back soon.” He glowered down at Dave. “Mr. Brandstetter. You’ve been stirring up trouble for me.”

  “Lou Squire and I go back a long way,” Dave said. “We have no secrets from each other. You and I ought to try that policy. Lies make for misunderstanding, Mr. Vickers. In this case serious misunderstandings. You weren’t at your desk the night Cricket Shales was killed. Why did you tell me you were?”

  “Who says I wasn’t?” Vickers said. Then he noticed the gap-toothed girl watching them. “Come on,” he said, and began striding off down that maze of hallways that led to the back porch. Dave did his best to keep up, halting and wincing. Vickers said, “Where I was had nothing to do with the death of Cricket Shales.” He unlocked the door to his back-porch office and sleeping quarters, and pushed inside.

  Dave followed him and closed the door. “The other lie—about not knowing Shales was out of prison and here in L.A.—that had a lot to do with it.”

  “All right, I knew.” Vickers sat down back of his desk. The Boss cap was perched over the telephone. He picked it up and put it on, tugging the bill down so it shadowed his eyes. “That doesn’t mean I killed him.”

  “Maybe not, but piling up lies turns suspicion on the bar. You wanted to know when Shales walked out of prison, so you could protect Rachel Klein from him. You telephoned her at her job the minute Lou Squire gave you the news. And told her to go into hiding.”

  “I didn’t lie to you about that,” Vickers said.

  Dave shrugged. “Keeping it back amounts to the same thing.” He sat down. “Was it your suggestion she go to Karen Goddard’s place?”

  “Please.” Vickers sighed grimly. “No, it was not.”

  “You weren’t happy with the idea?”

  Vickers’s laugh was brief. “Karen is gay, she’s in love with Rachel and always has been—hell, no, I wasn’t happy, but what could I say? Rachel wouldn’t have been safe here. After Cricket didn’t find her at work, didn’t find her at home, at her father’s, he’d have headed straight here. He knew about Rachel and me. She’d written and told him.”

  “At your suggestion, right?”

  “To make him see what he’d lost by doing drugs. It didn’t work the way I thought it would. It only made him want to kill me.” From outside came a shriek of rusty nails. A board clattered. Startled, Vickers looked that way. Then he turned Dave a wry smile. “I’m always believing people can be saved. That’s a weakness, but I can’t seem to shake it. Prison didn’t change Cricket Shales, or teach him anything.” Vickers’s big hands lifted, dropped sadly on the desk again. “His pockets were full of crack when they found him dead. He was right back to his old ways, wasn’t he?”

  “Not for long,” Dave said. “You were out that night. I have a witness.”

  “What witness?” More nails gave rusty cries. “Who?” Vickers jumped up, went to the screen door, pushed it open. “Noah—do you have to do this now? Come back later.” He let the door fall shut and went back to his desk.

  Dave asked him, “Where were you—following Shales around town, waiting for a chance to jump him in the dark?”

  Vickers sat down with an easy smile. “I was out practicing my profession. Drug-abuse counseling. It was an emergency. I get these calls for help.”

  “Good. Then you have someone to back up your story.”

  “Sorry.” Vickers shook his head. “I’m not dragging them into this. No names. I gave my word.”

  Dave sighed, pushed painfully to his feet. “All right. If that’s the way you want it.” He moved to the screen door. “But I think it’s only fair to warn you, you’re going to need all the help you can get.” He opened the screen. The top step was missing. Flinching, he stretched to reach the lower one. “Men called before grand juries always do.”

  Vickers looked out the door. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I wish I were,” Dave said, and limped away.

  Dave placed the big athletic shoes on the heaps of paperwork on Leppard’s desk, and Leppard blinked at them. He picked one up, peered inside. “Size fourteen?” He wrinkled his nose and put the shoe down again. “Smells wrong. Smells of garbage.”

  “I found it a few mornings ago in a dumpster back of Tomorrow House. The other one smells normal. That one I found this morning in an empty wooden storage locker at the apartment complex where Cricket Shales was murdered.”

  Leppard’s brows rose. He whist
led. “And they belong to Jordan Vickers, right?”

  “Do you know anyone else connected to the case who wears a size-fourteen shoe?” Dave said.

  “Sit down,” Leppard said, and Dave sat down. Leppard said, “What kind of locker?”

  “I suppose for brooms, rakes, clippers, garden hose,” Dave said. “Only empty, not in use—except by Zach Gruber, the first time, and—”

  Leppard nodded and held up a hand. “Ah—that locker. He crawled into it to get away from his mother. I remember it, sure.” He frowned and touched the shoe again. “And this morning you found this there?”

  “In a corner at the back. Stuck so I had to yank on it hard to get it loose.”

  “You saying he hid in there after he shot Shales?” Leppard asked. “When he heard Rachel coming?”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Dave said. “Then got out and ran like hell once she’d gone. So the shoe was stuck—he just pulled his foot out of it and left it. Those shots had been heard. Police would be there at any minute.”

  Leppard’s brow wrinkled. “But he was at his place, that office of his on the back porch, when Rachel came running to him in a panic about stumbling over Shales’s dead body on her doorstep.”

  “You forget she drove around for a long time first,” Dave said, “trying to figure out what to do. She bought Zach a chili dog and something to drink. He had plenty of time to get back to Tomorrow House.”

  “Yup.” Leppard blew breath out grimly. “Damn.” He looked up from scowling at the shoes. “You know, I was about ready to believe it was Karen Goddard.”

  “She’s a regular Annie Oakley with that thirty-two,” Dave said. “All she had to fire at last night was the sound of my voice. Pitch-dark in there. And she missed my head by inches. But Shales was shot at point-blank range. Anyone could have pulled the trigger. No experience necessary.”