Читать книгу An Old Man's Game - Andy Weinberger - Страница 9

Chapter 3

I HAVE TO DRIVE to Dora Ewing’s the next day, so right after I take my pills and Carmen shows up to fix Loretta her coffee and morning oatmeal, and after she’s settled down all warm and comfy in front of the television, I sift through my top dresser drawer, where the socks are, to find my car keys. I haven’t driven all that much since we came to Park La Brea. It’s not retirement exactly, more like the system is quietly shutting down all on its own. We live pretty simple: there’s a Ralph’s down on Wilshire for the daily basics and a Kmart for everything else. I don’t need anything, tell you the truth. The last time I splurged and bought myself a brand-new pair of pants, Reagan was still eating jelly beans at the White House.

But Dr. Ewing is another story. She’s in Culver City, not so far away, but still a place that used to be considered nowhere. Now I guess you could argue the other way around. People like it in Culver City because, I dunno, maybe it reminds them of the small town they left behind to come to LA. Or because someone has decided that the nondescript tract homes there are suddenly worth millions. Or maybe because it now has the fragrance of fresh money. Lots of trees and fountains in Culver City. Lots of colorful shops. Or shoppes, as they’d probably rather call them. And cute restaurants that serve tiny rich French food on even tinier plates. Which would be a problem for guys like me, if I ever went there, which I do, every ten years or so.

I drive a blue Honda Accord from the previous century. It’s got at least two hundred thousand miles on it, and it’s not fast or pretty, but then neither am I anymore. The thing about my car is, it’s so old and ugly and beat to hell no one in their right mind would ever try to steal it. I could leave it unlocked anywhere in LA and it would still be sitting there when I got back. Okay, I’ve never put that idea to the test, but I know this much: you’d have to be crazy or desperate or both to want what I have.

I plug a mix tape in the slot above the radio and punch the plastic buttons until the tune I want comes on. James Taylor. Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone. Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you. I can’t tell you how much I love that song, even though it always floats me back to Vietnam. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end. God, it doesn’t get any more beautiful than that. And if I listen to it more than once in an afternoon, it’ll make me cry.

I go down Hauser and roll nice and leisurely along Venice, past the old Helms Bakery building. It’s still standing, still majestic, if a little downtrodden. They’re shuffling other businesses in there right now, furniture and bedding outlets, and they look to be doing okay. But it’s such a barn of a place. In my book the handwriting’s on the wall. Sooner or later you gotta figure it’ll end up being dust and cobwebs and broken windows. Or maybe Walmart or Costco will come in someday and decide to take it over. That’s the American way, not that it matters.

The clinic Dr. Ewing works out of is a redbrick three-story affair just off the main drag. It might have been a shoe factory once upon a time. There’s free parking with validation in the back lot. I take the stub the machine spits out and pull into a shady space near an old sycamore tree. Downstairs there’s a sporting-gear place called Good to Go and a rare-stamp dealer named Marvin P. Watts, By Appointment Only. Dr. Ewing is on the second floor. I take the elevator and in no time at all I’m in an air-conditioned, pastel-colored room with abstract art on the walls and easy-listening music piping through. I’m leaning on the counter and making nice with her receptionist, a black woman in a tight pink sweater named Magnolia. That’s what it says on her name tag anyway. I’m too old to think about such things, but just so you know, Magnolia was made for that sweater.

“Amos Parisman. I have a ten o’clock with Dr. Ewing. I may be just a little early.”

She hands me a cheap ballpoint pen and a pale blue health form to fill out. “Tell me again what you said on the phone, Mr. Parisman,” she says, “what’s the reason for your visit?”

“Well now,” I say, in between reading and checking off the endless yes/no questions on the form—diabetes, cancer, heart disease, trouble passing urine—“it’s kind of personal, you know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.” She wriggles her pink sweater closer to her hips. “That’s usually code for some sort of man problem.” When I don’t respond to this, she looks annoyed. “It’s okay,” she says. “You can tell me, I’ve heard everything. Or just about. Anyway, we’ve got to put something down there for doctor to look at. So what’ll it be?”

“Let’s see.” I bite my lip. “Why don’t you put down ‘mortality.’ That’s a huge concern of mine at the moment.”

“Mortality?”

“Yeah, mortality.” I flash her my best goofy old man smile and turn in the completed questionnaire. “We’re all gonna die, right?”

She shakes her head, shrugs, and fills in the blank.

Fifteen minutes go by before Dr. Ewing steps into the waiting room, and her eyes light on me. She’s holding a clipboard against her chest, inscribed, I presume, with my very own chosen malady. “Mr. Parisman?” she says. “Right this way.”

She opens a door that leads us into a small antiseptic cubicle. There’s the usual padded table covered by a broad white sheet of sanitizing paper, a stainless steel sink in the corner, a stand-up scale with adjustable weights, a cardboard box of pullout disposable gloves, a blood pressure cuff, and other paraphernalia. On the far wall, there’s also a full-sized, full-color poster of a grown man’s interior organs—thorax, lungs, kidneys, right down to his nuts.

“So,” Dr. Ewing says, a little perplexed, “we were going to do the usual routine—check your weight and blood pressure, ask about your meds. But first, what’s all this about mortality?”

Even in heels she’s only a bit over five feet, and at first her short spiky blond hair makes me wonder. Still, there’s something oddly beautiful about her. A rebelliousness in her eyes, and in the way she carries herself. Jason and Remo got that right. The lab coat is out of place, however. Starched and clean, but the sleeves are rolled back, as if meant for someone much taller. She seems painfully aware of this.

“Your receptionist said we had to put something down,” I tell her. “Fill in the blank, you know. Me, I’m more of an essay-question kind of guy. That was the first thing that popped into my head. Sorry.”

“So you’re not about to die?”

“I don’t think so.” I take the liberty of plopping down on the examining table. “Is this okay? I don’t want to spoil your sheets.”

She nods, checks something else on her clipboard, looks up again. “And you also didn’t bother to list your date of birth, Mr. Parisman. Why’s that?”

“Oh, vanity, I suppose. I was thirty-nine for the longest time. I studied with Jack Benny.” I try winking at her. Nothing. “Now I’m a little older.”

She offers up a faint smile. Of course she’s not nearly old enough to know who Jack Benny was, but still she has this pasted-on professional smile; in an alternate universe, I imagine, where people of her generation read books and listened to broadcasts of old-time radio shows, she might know. In any case, she’s exquisite looking, and her smile is telling me all things are possible. “So there’s nothing wrong with you then. No specific complaints?”

“Actually, doc, there is something wrong,” I say. “I’m here to ask you for your help. You have another patient.”

“I do?”

“Well, let me back up: you had one, until about a week or so ago. Fellow named Ezra Diamant. Fifty-three years old. Loud. Heavyset. Smoker. That ring a bell?”

“Diamant? The rabbi?” Now she’s on high alert. The smile is gone, and suddenly, I see there’s hardly any time left on the clock to make my case.

“His family, and the members of his congregation feel like his death wasn’t accidental. They’re hurting. You must know what that’s like for them. And they’ve asked me to look into it.” I hand her my business card, just to show that I’m for real, but she barely gives it a glance before dropping it into her pocket.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Parisman. Even if I knew anything that could help you, this a matter of confidentiality.”

“Sure, sure, you’ve already talked to the police, though.”

“I can’t even discuss that.”

“That’s okay. Jason and Remo dropped by to see you, I’ve heard. Lieutenant Malloy, he’s the guy they work for, he told me as much.”

“Then maybe you should discuss this with Lieutenant Malloy.” She opens the door to the consulting room. “I think it’s time for you to leave now.”

I’m still hunkered down on her padded table. Through the open doorway, Magnolia’s pink sweater comes into view.

“I’m interested in his medications,” I say. “They said he had a heart attack, so if, for example, you changed his prescriptions or the dosages recently—well, that could tell us a lot.”

“Get out, Mr. Parisman. Now.”

“Because his people deserve to know, doctor. His wife and daughters, the whole synagogue, they’re all in the dark. They’re in shock. They’re grieving. At the moment, this is being treated as a terrible tragedy, which I’m sure you’ll agree it is, but your whole career could be on the line if it turns out—”

Her tone grows a little more shrill. “I’m through talking with you, Mr. Parisman. And if you don’t leave right away, I’m calling the police.”

“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands. “I can take a hint.” I shuffle past her into the pastel waiting room, where Magnolia, who has heard virtually every word, is tapping her fingernails on the desk, glaring at me. Two other ladies who must have just arrived, are sitting there, side by side, fashion magazines propped on their laps. They both look up, openmouthed. If it were Charles Manson instead of me, they’d be just as horrified. Malloy was right. I shoulda listened. This was a fiasco. And by the time I’m in my car and the key is in the ignition, I realize I’ve made an even worse mistake: I forgot to validate the goddamn parking stub.

Later that night, after I pay Carmen for her time and we have dinner and watch the six o’clock news, I’m rinsing the dishes and talking things out with Loretta. Her latest doctor, a guy named Ali, says she may be in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s, or whatever-the-hell they’re calling it. Not that I care about medical terms. They’re just words, right? And anyway, depending on who you’re talking to, the diagnosis seems to change every few months. Could be a form of dementia. Could be something to do with nerves. For me, of course, things have also shifted over the last couple years. It’s no longer equal between us. I still pay the bills. I do the grocery shopping. I cook a lot more now than I ever did, and I drag out the vacuum cleaner once a week, though once in a while I forget. Every night I thank the God I don’t believe in for Carmen. All I know is what I have to do to keep things on an even keel, which, let me tell you, is plenty.

I met Loretta just after I got out of the Marines. That was in 1973. I was letting my hair grow down to around my shoulders, partly as a statement about how I’d been used and abused by the military, and also because everyone in my neighborhood was doing the same thing. That was when I had lotsa hair, mind you. I was going back to school in Berkeley and Loretta was in my psychology class. Brown eyes, a tiny bounce in her step. I think she fell in love with me because I seemed so serious compared with the other men on campus. They were nice enough kids, I thought, but all they really wanted was to stay alive and smoke as much dope as humanly possible. Basically, they wanted to steer clear of Vietnam. That was their major, and I couldn’t blame them for that. I was glad to be done with it, too.

Loretta liked that I was different, that I’d been to war, seen it with my own eyes. She was against the war, of course, but she wanted to hear about it, how we trained, what we did once we got over there. I told her some stuff, but I kept most of the grisly bits to myself. Even then, I felt a need to protect her, I suppose. She was so innocent. Also, I didn’t much want to see that movie all over again. Once I mentioned my buddy Sam, a black guy from Biloxi. I loved Sam. We went through Basic together. We ate together. We slept together. Even chased after the same Vietnamese girl in a bar in Saigon one time. Sam was my guiding star. I’d do anything for Sam. But then one day we were on patrol and he was walking point, and he got a little too far out in front of us. A runty, undernourished kid—all of them looked like that—rose up out of the brush and shot him in the back. He never saw it coming. We carried him all the way back to the helicopter, but it was too late. He just closed his eyes and bled out. I sobbed for three whole days. I wished it had been me instead of him. And that’s when I began to see how pointless it was. That’s when I stopped believing.

“Why did the rabbi die?” Loretta asks me now. She’s already asked me once.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Somebody hates him?”

“Maybe, sweetheart. Probably so. Every human being I’ve ever met hates somebody sometimes, right?”

“I don’t hate.”

“No, that’s true, you don’t. But you’re an angel, so you don’t count.”

She grins. “You married an angel.”

I nod, start dropping forks and knives and spoons back in the drawer one at a time. Clink, clink, clink. “Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it was just a simple accident. He could have had a heart attack. That’s what the cops think.”

She points a finger at the side of her head, like it’s a loaded gun. “Cops don’t think,” she says. For some reason, this notion makes her very happy. She starts to giggle.

I give her a disappointed look. “I don’t know where on earth that came from,” I say.

Later, when the lights of Hollywood are twinkling in the distance and the apartment is finally still, I slip off my shoes and snuggle up next to her on the couch. “Shove over, Loretta. For an angel, you take up a helluva lot of room, you know.”

She starts to giggle again, then takes my arm and wraps it gently around her shoulder. “You love me,” she says, as much to herself as to me.

“You better believe it.”

“I want a cookie.”

“We don’t have any more.” This is a lie, but I’m worn-out and there’s no point getting up and rummaging around in the kitchen. “How about I get you a cookie tomorrow?”

She nods. “All right.”

“Hey wait. How about you pretend that I’m your cookie?”

She turns to me. “You’re not a cookie,” she says.

After I put her to bed, I go into the other bedroom, which I’ve sort of made into an office. Beyond my computer, there’s not all that much worth looking at on the desk. A picture of my parents on their wedding day in 1938. They’re standing arm in arm on some stone steps in front of the rabbi’s house where they were just married. August in the Bronx. Ain’t got a barrel of money, but who cares? This is their moment. They don’t know about the war that’s coming their way. There’s so much they don’t know. They’re so young and innocent it hurts to look at them.

Right beside the photo is another one of my late brother, Sy. He’s sitting bare-chested in his sailboat, a cigar nestled in his hand. He’s got a grin on his face as if he’s just heard the best joke ever. The sun is shining, and you can almost feel the wind in his hair and the sea bobbing all around him. That’s the sum total of my mementos. Oh, except for one other thing. On the wall in front of me is a framed eight-by-ten photograph of a little boy.

His name is Enrique Avila. He disappeared while walking home from school. He was eight years old, and it was one of the first cases I ever took on. Also the most painful, because I never found him. He just vanished, it seemed, like smoke into the air. No clues, no witness, nothing. That was nearly forty years ago, and still, whenever I’m in his old neighborhood of Alhambra I can’t help myself. I’ll drive up and down the quiet, residential streets. I’ll stare at vacant buildings, at stores that weren’t even there back then. And I’ll wonder what the hell happened, what did I miss.

Enrique is kind of my son, I guess you’d say, since Loretta and I never had one of our own. Every so often I try to conjure him up. He’d be well into middle age by now if he were still alive. He’d have a beer belly, maybe a wife and a couple of kids and a mortgage. When I look at his picture, I don’t see him as a big achiever; he would probably never be the smartest kid in class, or the fastest sprinter. He wouldn’t win the spelling bee, and his project in the science fair would be routinely overshadowed by others. He might go to the prom, but he’d never be the homecoming king. You can tell he was destined to have a happy, normal life. An uneventful life even. And that would have suited him just fine, if he had lived.

It’s after nine, but I’m sure the lieutenant will still be up. He never sleeps.

The phone barely rings before he answers. “Malloy,” I say, “it’s Amos Parisman.”

“I know. I’ve got caller ID.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t. I wanted to let you know though, I ignored your advice and went to see Dr. Ewing today.”

“And?”

“And everything you told me was right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That she was beautiful, and that she wouldn’t tell me squat.”

“Why don’t you ever listen, Amos?”

“I’m stubborn that way, Bill. And I’m an old man and probably an embarrassment to every detective who ever walked the earth. Anyway, I forgot to ask you yesterday whether your boys found out what drugs the rabbi was on?”

“Oh, we got a list from the wife. Nothing to get too excited about: Blood pressure. High cholesterol. An anti-depressant, but he stopped taking that a while ago.”

“And they were all prescribed by Dr. Ewing?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t recall. Might well have been some other guy. I’ll have to check the record and get back to you. You don’t think she—” Another pause. I could almost feel him getting business-like. “You know, I’m really not supposed to do this kind of thing.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Hell no, it’s against the rules.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Against the rules. Boy, it’s just damn lucky you’re a friend, Amos. That’s all I gotta say.”

“You’re right. And what’re friends for?”

“Beats me,” he says.