Free Country of Old Men by Joseph Hansen

“You’re good at your job, aren’t you?”
    “We’ll see,” Dave said. “Where is she, Ms. Goddard?”
    “You think I could have told the police that, too?” She laughed. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke away. “She could be anyplace. If I were her, I’d be in Tierra del Fuego.”
    “I’ll look there next,” Dave said. “Do you think she was so frightened of him she shot him?”
    “She believed in life,” Karen Goddard said. “No—she wouldn’t have shot anyone—not even that miserable Cricket.”
    “Am I right?” Dave lit a cigarette, happy to be in company that wouldn’t frown about it. “You knew him before you took Rachel to hear him that night?”
    “A long time. He was a studio musician, a backup artist. He used to work here, as he did for a lot of other record producers. I can’t say I knew him—but I knew his work, and whatever his drawbacks as a human being, which turned out to be worse than those of Count Dracula, he was a gifted musician. Original. Imaginative. Terrific taste. Then one of the engineers here mentioned he played weekends all the time at Shadows, and I went to hear him.”
    “And took Rachel—why?” He nodded. “That’s her desk. But two other people work here with you. Why not them?”
    “She was new here, seemed kind of lonely. Besides, they didn’t give a damn about music. Rachel loved music.”
    Dave rose, stepped to the desk with Rachel Klein’s name on it, and began opening and closing drawers.
    Karen Goddard said, “Don’t you need a search warrant?”
    “That’s strange. I don’t find any personal effects.”
    “What do you mean? This is her workplace.”
    “Women keep makeup, nail polish, that kind of thing in their desks.” He turned. “I’ll bet I’d find a lot of personal things in yours, if I looked. Lipstick, aspirin, chewing gum, Rolaids, cologne, God knows.”
    “Men do it, too,” she said defensively.
    “True. Did she know Cricket was out of prison?”
    “She’d have told me. She thought he’d be in for years.”
    “Then why did she take her things?” Dave said.
    Karen Goddard only stared at him. Not in fright, no. Something grimmer. But he didn’t ask what. She wouldn’t tell him. He said thank you and good-bye, and left.

7
    A YELLOW RENTAL PANEL truck was parked, facing the street, in the driveway of the small stucco house in Van Nuys. A pair of trees of heaven bowed over squares of unmowed lawn. Dave pushed trailing branches aside to go up the path to the door. He pressed the bell button there, but the response came from the driveway. A voice called, “What do you want?” Dave looked. A short old man with a shock of white hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses slid a carton into the truck and came across the grass, brushing dust from his hands. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow. His trousers were old and shapeless, the kind kept for household chores. “I’m Irwin Klein. Did you want to see me?”
    Dave showed him his license and told him his name and the reason he’d come.
    Klein said, “The police were already here. A black man named Leppard—a little bit like his namesake, too. And a nice Jewish boy named Samuels.”
    “I’ve heard their report,” Dave said. “There’s nothing in it about Rachel’s whereabouts.”
    “She isn’t here,” Klein said glumly. “She wouldn’t come here. It made me laugh to think the police would believe she’d come running to me when she was in trouble. Who am I to help her? Only her father, who loved her from babyhood, my only child, child of my old age, I who gave her—” He broke that off, and turned for a moment to watch a youngish, soft-looking man in T-shirt and jeans hoist another carton into the yellow truck. He called, “Did you list them all?”
    “Every title, Mr. Klein,” the man said wearily.
    “And you numbered the carton? And the number is on the list?”
    “It’s on the clipboard. You