Free Country of Old Men by Joseph Hansen Page A

want to see it?”
    Klein shook his head. “Just don’t miss any—that’s all I ask. That Fliegel will claim he didn’t get this, he didn’t get that. He’ll try to cheat me.”
    “I won’t miss any.” The man went back up the driveway and out of sight.
    “I lost my shop,” Klein said. “An Iranian bought the building and raised the rent. I was barely able to hang on as it was. Pay four times more? In that location, with robbers walking in off the street? No way.”
    Dave remembered now where he’d met Klein. “The bookshop on Santa Monica near Fairfax?”
    “‘The Shakespeare Head,’” Klein smiled. “You remember it?” He peered through those thick lenses. “Maybe you were a customer once?”
    “More than once, Mr. Klein,” Dave said. “It was a good shop. You moved the books here, did you?”
    “To my garage.” His laugh was mournful. “While I looked for another place. They’re all too expensive.” He opened the door of the house, gestured Dave inside. “I’m too old to start again, anyway.” The living room was cool and dim. Leading the way through it, and through a dusty dining room, and into a sun-bright kitchen, he went on talking. “This city has run money mad. What do they care for books? The lives and wisdom of the best minds of the past? What does any of that mean to hustlers and gangsters? They call themselves businessmen, but they’re not.” He opened a refrigerator and brought out bottles of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic. “Gouging decent people, paying off officials to get their way.” He pried the caps off the squatty bottles. “Respect for literature, art, music—not unless there’s a profit to be made.” He took drinking glasses from a dish rack beside the sink, set them on the table of a breakfast nook. “We had a beautiful public library in this city. Downtown. You remember that library?”
    Dave nodded and poured celery tonic into his glass.
    “Well, do you know what happened to it? Developers wanted the land it stands on. So they hired an arsonist to burn it out. He was never caught. Shall I tell you why?” Klein drank off half his celery tonic, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, belched. “Because the authorities were bribed to fumble the investigation. Why not? These big developers have millions to buy whatever they want—while the homeless starve and freeze, and the second largest city in America goes without a public library. It stands there, but empty. And you’ll see—one of these days, it will be gone.”
    “You were telling me about Rachel,” Dave said.
    Klein blinked, frowned. “Ah, yes. Of course. Excuse me. I’m upset. Losing my shop—it’s the last piece of my life I had left. First Rachel, then my wife—she died after three operations, a year in the hospital—and now my shop. Everything that meant anything to me. All gone.”
    “Why did you lose Rachel?”
    “Because of Cricket. She brought him to meet me. He was trash. A wonderful musician, she said. His music was also trash. I knew he’d mean the end of her. I told her so. And she never came back. When her mother was dying, I went to find her.” Klein winced. “I didn’t know her. She looked terrible, sick, starved, she didn’t talk sense—as if she’d lost her mind. She used filthy language—my little Rachel.”
    “It was the drugs talking,” Dave said.
    “She’d always loved her mother, they were friends, true friends. But, no, she wouldn’t go to her. I told her her mother was begging to see her. ‘Please come now,’ I said, ‘there’s not much time left. She’s slipping away from us, Rachel.’” Tears leaked from under the thick spectacles. “She ran into a bedroom and locked the door. I could hear her weeping. I knocked on the door. ‘Please, Rachel, come on now, hurry.’ But she wouldn’t open the door. She screamed at me to go away. She was sobbing so I could hardly make out the words, but these I heard—‘She wouldn’t know me, anyway,