The Old Dick Read online

  “Oh, that’s nice. I thought maybe you’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Of course not. Why would I do that, Mrs. Bernstein?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t like my cooking?”

  “Don’t be silly. I love your cooking. It’s just that I’ve been busy lately.”

  We were nearly yelling at each other across her front yard. I figured I had better stay on the sidewalk or else she’d ask me in for some of her homemade coffeecake.

  “So why are we shouting, Mr. Spanner? Why don’t you come in for some nice lemon tea and homemade coffee-cake?”

  “Gee, Mrs. Bernstein, I’d love to, but I’m expecting an important phone call.”

  “Then how about dinner tonight? I made your favorite cabbage rolls, and I’ve got plenty.”

  “Golly, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m meeting an old friend.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  She struck just the right note of hurt disappointment to make me feel like a real shit, and I almost said, “Look, I really am. I’m keeping an ex-gangster company when he delivers three-quarters of a million dollars to ransom back his kidnapped grandson.” But I didn’t think it would help. Instead, I said, “Maybe another time?”

  “Next week?”

  “Maybe,” I said uncertainly.

  “Friday?”

  Shit. For the second time in an hour I’d been suckered. And I used to be pretty fast on my feet. Was this a sign that all those little blood vessels in my brain were starting to dry up?

  “Yeah, Friday’ll be swell.”

  Mrs. Bernstein brightened considerably. “And don’t worry. I’ll make another batch of your favorite.”

  “That’ll be great.”

  “You know, they were my husband’s favorite, too.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” I almost added that I liked them in just the same way, but only a complete asshole would be ironic at the expense of a kindly, if pushy, old lady.

  “I’ll never forget that I made them on the night he was killed.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I hope I’ll have better luck.”

  “I hope so too... Jake.” She smiled tentatively.

  I smiled back, waved, and walked off.

  “Don’t forget,” she called. “Friday.”

  I shook my head and waved again.

  Nice going, Spanner. Another victory for honesty and forthrightness.

  Swell.

  Well, it was still a week and a half off. Maybe by then I’d have a bad cold and be unable to smell or taste anything.

  Yeah, maybe.

  * * *

  I went up my driveway, trying not to look at the disaster that was my front lawn. The grass was mostly gone, and small piles of petrifying dog turds dotted the area like ornamental displays in a coprophiliac’s rock garden. Years of fertilizing, reseeding, resodding, and a generation of Japanese gardeners hadn’t been able to do anything with it. Now, old and broke, I had yielded to the inevitable. Even the crabgrass was dying.

  My house, like all the other ones in the neighborhood, was a tiny two-bedroom box built right after the war. I was only the second occupant of the house—the first lost everything in one of the phony-oil-well swindles that swept California in the late forties—and I had been there about thirty years. When I moved in, I had my choice of buying or renting. At the time, I had been doing pretty well, and could have plunked down the seven grand they were asking and owned the place outright. Needless to say, I didn’t.

  What the hell. Rents were cheap and there was no reason to think things would ever be different. More important, even though I was old enough to have known better, I still had the feeling that big changes were imminent, that something was about to happen. When it did, I wanted to be able to move fast and light, unburdened by things like houses and mortgages. That attitude was one of the reasons my wife had packed up a couple of years earlier, thereby disencumbering me of herself and our kid.

  So for twenty years, just like the twenty years that had preceded them, I went on feeling like I was a transient, that this arrangement was only temporary until something better came along, that there was still plenty of time to make a decision. Until the day that, with the clarity of vision that can only come with hindsight, I woke up and realized I had blown it. I was old and retired. The real value of the dough I had so carefully put away was decreasing by the minute. There was no P.I. pension plan, no annuity for old gumshoes. And the dumpy little tract house I had been renting for a quarter of my life was suddenly worth sixty-five grand, way out of reach of an ancient private eye whose string had long since been played out.

  Like I told Sal, I had been a jerk.

  The only thing that was keeping me even half afloat was the fact that over the years I had become good friends with Hank Cheney, the present owner of the house and my landlord. He didn’t need the money, and I had once done him a favor, gotten his kid out of a jam, so he let me have the place cheap, way below what he could get for it.

  Now it looked like that arrangement, too, might be about over. Hank was involved in litigation with his kid, the same one I had helped. The kid, now a hot-shot thirty-seven-year-old accountant, was trying to use Hank’s gesture of friendship and generosity as evidence of mental incompetence. The idea was to get his father institutionalized so he could take control of his affairs. If Hank’s failure to maximize profits was accepted as a sign of feeblemindedness, I was in big trouble.

  Shit.

  I should have dumped the kid in the river when I had the chance.

  Mrs. Bernstein, on the other hand, had been letting me know for years that her house was completely paid for. The unspoken suggestion was that it could easily become my house as well, if I were interested. At moments, the idea was not without appeal... until I thought about her yoo-hoos, and her print dresses, and her mothering, and her revolting grandchildren, and her cabbage rolls. Put that way, an East L. A. welfare hotel and Tender Vittles didn’t look too bad.

  Sure, it didn’t. Who was I kidding?

  Well, something might turn up.

  I went in the back door, through the kitchen that was filling up with dirty dishes, and into the living room. I sank down on the big floral-patterned maroon davenport that was far too large for the small area. I sat on something that I supposed was a giant gardenia, and the cushion exhaled a tired sigh that echoed my own. The furniture had belonged to the previous occupant. I had never especially liked it, but had never gotten around to changing it. Now it was like me, faded, with very little bounce left in it. And I still didn’t like it.

  I put my feet up on a dark wood coffee table that bore the circle marks of ten thousand glasses, and leaned back, closing my eyes. I thought about Sal and the night ahead. Bah. Madness. Insanity. I could only hope it wouldn’t be a giant mistake. I tried not to think about what could happen. I tried not to think about my possible eviction. I tried not to think about my dirty dishes.

  No luck.

  I knew I should get some rest, for the night, but even though I was tired from my run in the park and starting to ache, I was too keyed up. Hell, crazy though I thought it was, I had to admit I was excited about the prospect of a little activity.

  I stood up with a groan and got an enamel metal box out of the corner cabinet. I pulled the Venetian blinds shut, making the room even drearier than usual, and sat back down. I filled the tiny clay bowl of my long-stemmed Moroccan pipe with some good home-grown stuff, lit it, and sucked the harsh smoke deep into my lungs. Almost immediately I felt it going to work. As those kids in the park might have said, it was dynamite weed.

  Those same kids also probably wouldn’t have believed what I was doing. Since every new generation seems to think that they invented the wheel, be it sex or dope or talking dirty, they’d have trouble accepting the fact that I’d been smoking marijuana since before their parents were born.

  I smiled. The memory of the first time was still vivid, coming back to me now nearly every time I lit up.

  It was in the twent
ies, and I had come down from Paris to Tangier. In those days, surprisingly enough, Tangier really did resemble the fantasies that Hollywood would create during the thirties and forties about North Africa. It was mysterious, alien, wide-open, sinister; as a young would-be writer who thought he should put away experiences like preserves for a long winter, I loved it all.

  Not an hour off the boat, I was wandering around the medina, negotiating narrow alleys, inhaling the street smells of saffron and rotting garbage and piss, and I went—naturally—into the most mysterious, sinister-looking café I could find. I eventually realized that they all looked sinister and mysterious, but in fact were not any more so than a neighborhood bar or soda fountain. It was a great disappointment. But there were compensations.

  There were only men in the café, some sitting around small rickety tables, others squatting on mats on the floor, playing a card game that seemed to involve nothing except throwing each card down as hard as possible while voicing some Arabic expletive.

  Immediately after I sat down, the waiter brought me a steaming glass of mint tea and an odd, small-bowled pipe. Since other men were smoking similar pipes, I figured it was some kind of local custom. I didn’t especially want to smoke, but to refuse would have been unfriendly and impolite. At that point, I’d never heard of kif.

  Imagine my surprise.

  The waiter kept bringing me fresh glasses of the hot sweet tea and freshly filled pipes. I later learned that his name was Habib and he’d worked at the café since he was a small boy. His head was narrow, and his hair was cut so short I could see the moles on his scalp. He had a four-day stubble of beard on his sunken cheeks. His breath smelled of cardamom when he bent close to me, smiling, asking earnestly, “Etes-vous bien fumé? Etes-vous bien fumé?”

  After a couple of pipes, my French disappeared. After a couple more, my English did, too.

  “Etes-vous bien fumé?”

  I could only nod my head and grin like an idiot, trying to keep my tongue tucked inside my mouth. Yeah, thanks. I was very well smoked. Indeed.

  Back home it was easy to get dope if you wanted it, even during the great marijuana scare of the thirties. If my work didn’t put me in contact with someone who could provide it, the after-hours joints where musicians hung out were always a sure bet.

  It was never a big deal with me, just something without which my life would have been a little less pleasant. And now, the older I got, the worse things would be without it.

  At my age, alcohol could have really bad effects. The same with all those pills—tranks, barbiturates, mood elevators—the doctors were so anxious to hand out in order to get you out of the office so they could treat patients who had something more curable than old age. My lungs were still okay, though, so I figured smoke was a better, safer way to relax, sleep, feel good. And I sure as hell wasn’t concerned about possible long-term side effects.

  It was also cheap. Liquor and unnecessary medicine were too expensive for nonexistent incomes, but marijuana didn’t cost anything if you grew it yourself. Even I, who couldn’t do shit with my front lawn, had a couple of great little bushes out by the back fence, that provided enough to keep me happy through the year.

  From what I gathered, I wasn’t the only decrepit degenerate doing this. Besides those of us who’d been smoking since it was known as boo or tea, there were lots, maybe introduced to it by their grandkids, who were starting to indulge. It made too much sense not to.

  But it was kept kind of quiet. There were too many tight-assed prigs around who believed it was utterly disgusting and unnatural for people beyond a certain age to want to have any fun. You were just supposed to sit quietly, not to make a fuss, and wait for the big D to bring you blessed relief. The idea of groups of old coots sitting in the TV rooms of their Senior Centers, smoking themselves silly, would be almost too shocking for words. I could see the headlines in the tabloids next to the supermarket checkout:

  GOLDEN-AGE DOPE FIENDS

  Retirement-Village Pot Orgies

  Superannuated Hophead Tells All!

  I laughed.

  Oh, yes. Once again I seemed to be pretty well smoked.

  I got up, put the enameled box back in the cabinet, and opened the blinds. Hazy light streamed in, making the thick layer of dust beneath the furniture very evident I stretched out full length on the couch, my feet resting on the stamen of a giant tulip, the backs of my knees caressing a nearly obscene orchid, and my butt again settling on the welcoming gardenia. I felt like a stoned pixie.

  I reached behind my head and got a paperback from the lamp table. The saga of Duke Pachinko and the granite-faced private eye with the permanently engorged member had been left behind in the park. Not much of a loss. The new one was something called Red Vengeance, featuring, the back cover assured me, “a detective who made Mickey Spillane look like a Boy Scout.” Dandy.

  Whatever happened to that intense, solemn young man who had gone to Paris a couple of centuries ago? The would-be intellectual, the college graduate, the student of literature. He’d sat around cafés, discussing Art and Life as though he’d known something about both of them, talking about obscure poetry with even more obscure poets, impressing impressionable young ladies with his high seriousness, in an effort to get inside their knickers. Jesus. He, along with a hundred thousand equally earnest young Americans in Paris at that time, was going to be a writer.

  So what happened?

  He finally had the honesty to admit that even though he wanted to be A Writer, there was no way in the world he was going to write.

  Then he went home.

  And fifty years later he was lying on an unbelievably ugly couch, reading about a guy named Al Tracker who could shatter other guys jaws without ever hurting his own hand, and who had beautiful women lining up to give him blow jobs.

  Tempus fugit.

  Forty pages into the book, there had been a garroting, a defenestration, a dismemberment, and a gang rape. Al was out for vengeance (red, I supposed), and a malignant dwarf with a steel hand was out to rip Al’s balls off.

  I dozed off.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was dark when a pair of dogs, arguing about who got to go where on my front yard, woke me up. As usual when I went to sleep on the couch, my neck had cramped in an awkward position, and it took a couple of minutes to unkink myself.

  I got up, grabbed a plate of cold chicken from the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen table. After a couple of bites, I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. My stomach was churning, acidy, like I had just eaten some of Mrs. Bernstein’s kugel. It was the feeling I’d always gotten before an important operation. Pregame jitters, I supposed; the uncertainty before action. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like that. Even though it wasn’t especially pleasant, I was surprised to realize I had missed it. You felt lousy, but you did know you were alive, that something was on the line. Christ. If I felt this way, what the hell was Sal going through? Poor son of a bitch.

  A hot shower and a careful shave filled up twenty minutes. Dressing, another ten.

  I didn’t know what to expect, but in situations like this I’d always figured you wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, nothing bright or flashy, so I put on the darkest clothes I had. A chocolate-brown shirt buttoned at the neck and wrists, navy-blue trousers, and black canvas high-tops. Quite elegant. I looked like a seedy cat-burglar. Or one of those old guys who hung around playgrounds with deep baggy pockets filled with jangling change. Great. I’d become a model for Molester’s Monthly. But at least I’d be able to blend into the shadows if I had to.

  If I had to. Shit.

  For obvious reasons I usually didn’t spend much time in front of mirrors, but I did that evening. I wanted to see if there were any signs, any visible indications, of the man I had once been, the tough, competent operator who could be relied on in a pinch to come through. Did any of that still remain to be seen? Or was it only inside? Or there at all? I couldn’t tell. Maybe in the eyes, maybe something in
the jaw. The angle of the head. I just couldn’t tell.

  I shook my head. Something was happening to me. Sal had shaken loose a lot of stuff I generally tried not to think about, and I didn’t like it. “J. Spanner: Disappeared while gazing upon his reflection; presumed drowned.”

  Come on, Sal. Hurry up. Let’s get going. Let’s get it over with.

  I tried to read, but even the malignant dwarf being thrown into a threshing machine failed to hold my attention.

  I turned on the television. It filled up the silence in the room, but I couldn’t focus on it. Trying to think of unknown possibilities, what-ifs, made me antsy, and I kept getting up, because I felt like I had to piss. I didn’t. I wondered if I was getting kidney stones. Maybe cancer of the bladder. Maybe...

  I was stewing so much that I nearly jumped when the doorbell finally rang.

  Under the dim yellow porch light Sal’s eyes were completely in shadow and he looked even more cadaverous than he had that afternoon. I unhooked the screen door and he came in.

  He was wearing the same clothes. He carried a black leather attaché case with two half-inch stripes of red leather running around it about a third of the way in. It probably came from Rodeo Drive and was probably worth more than all of my living room furniture. Sal’s knuckles were white as he gripped the handle.

  His eyes ran quickly over my nifty outfit. He didn’t say anything. When he glanced around the living room, it looked as though he smelled something that was slightly off but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “This is just my summer place,” I said. “The main house is at Malibu, but I come here to avoid the crowds.”

  Sal grunted. “At least you’ve got something.”

  “But I don’t. That’s the problem.”

  He grunted again. I didn’t think he was hearing me.

  He looked at the couch, trying to decide which grotesque flower to sit on. He picked the tulip. I turned off the sound on the TV and sat on the gardenia again.