stuff, but who would have thought there was even one fugitive Nazi in a quiet little suburb like this? And when Dussander was taken to the hospital, we think that Mr X scooted over to the house and got that incriminating letter. And that by now it’s so many decomposing ashes floating around in the sewer system.’
‘That doesn’t make much sense either,’ Todd said.
‘Why not, Todd?’
‘Well, if Mr Denk… if Dussander had an old buddy from the camps, or just an old Nazi buddy, why did he bother to have me come over and read him that letter? I mean, if you could have heard him correcting me, and stuff… at least this old Nazi buddy you’re talking about would know how to speak German.’
‘A good point. Except maybe this other fellow is in a wheelchair, or blind. For all we know, it might be Hermann himself and he doesn’t even dare go out and show his face.’
‘Guys that are blind or in wheelchairs aren’t that good at scooting out to get letters,’ Todd said.
Richler looked admiring again. ‘True. But a blind man could steal a letter even if he couldn’t read it, though. Or hire it done.’
Todd thought this over, and nodded — but he shrugged at the same time to show how farfetched he thought the idea. Richler had progressed far beyond Robert Ludlum and into the land of Sax Rohmer. But how farfetched the idea was or wasn’t didn’t matter one fucking little bit, did it? No, what mattered was that Richler was still sniffing around… and that sheeny, Weiskopf, was also sniffing around. The letter, the goddam letter! If only he hadn’t been forced to make something up on the spur of the moment like that! And suddenly he was thinking of his .30-.30, cased and resting on its shelf in the cool, dark garage. He pulled his mind away from it quickly. The palms of his hands had gone damp.
‘Did Dussander have any friends that you knew of?’ Richler was asking.
‘Friends? No. There used to be a cleaning lady, but she moved away and he didn’t bother to get another one. In the summer he hired a kid to mow his lawn, but I don’t think he’d gotten one this year. The grass is pretty long, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. We’ve knocked on a lot of doors, and it doesn’t seem as if he’d hired anyone. Did he get phone- calls?’
‘Sure,’ Todd said off-handedly — here was a gleam of light, a possible escape-hatch that was relatively safe. DussanderY phone had actually rung only half a dozen tunes or so in all the time Todd had known him — salesmen, a polling organization asking about breakfast foods, the rest wrong numbers. He only had the phone in case he got sick… as he finally had, might his soul rot in hell. ‘He used to get a call or two every week.’
‘Did he speak German on those occasions?’ Richler asked quickly. He seemed excited.
‘No,’ Todd said, suddenly cautious. He didn’t like Richler’s excitement — there was something wrong about it, something dangerous. He felt sure of it, and suddenly Todd had to work furiously to keep himself from breaking a sweat. ‘He didn’t talk much at all. I remember that a couple of times he said things like, 'The boy who reads to me is here right now. I’ll call you back.'’
‘I’ll bet that’s it!’ Richler said, whacking his palms on his thighs. ‘I’d bet two weeks’ pay that was the guy!’ He closed his notebook with a snap (so far as Todd could see he had done nothing but doodle in it) and stood up. ‘I want to thank all three of you for your time. You in particular, Todd. I know all of this has been a hell of a shock to you, but it will be over soon. We’re going to turn the house upside down this afternoon — cellar to attic and then back down to the cellar again. We’re bringing in all the special teams. We may find some trace of Dussander’s phonemate yet.’
‘I hope so,’ Todd said.
Richler shook hands all around and left. Dick asked Todd if he felt like going out back and hitting the badminton birdie around until lunch. Todd said he didn’t feel much like badminton or lunch, and went upstairs with his head down and his shoulders slumped. His parents exchanged sympathetic, troubled glances. Todd lay down on his bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought about his .30-.30. He could see it very clearly in his mind’s eye. He thought about shoving the blued steel barrel right up Betty Trask’s slimy Jewish cooze -just what she needed, a prick that never went soft. How do you like it, Betty? He heard himself asking her, You just tell me if you get enough, okay? He imagined her screams. And at last a terrible flat smile came to his face. Sure, just tell me, you bitch… okay ? Okay ? Okay ?…
‘So what do you think?’ Weiskopf asked Richler when Richler picked him up at a luncheonette three blocks from the Bowden home.
‘Oh, I think the kid was in on it somehow,’ Richler said. ‘Somehow, some way, to some degree. But is he cool? If you poured hot water into his mouth I think he’d spit out icecubes. I tripped him up a couple of times, but I’ve got nothing I could use in court And if I’d gone much further, some smart lawyer might be able to get him off on entrapment a year or two down the road even if something does pull together. I mean, he’s still a juvenile. Technically, at least In some ways, I’d guess he hasn’t really been a juvenile since he was maybe eight He’s creepy, man.’ Richler stuck a cigarette in his mouth and laughed — the laugh had a shaky sound. ‘I mean, really fuckin’ creepy.’
‘What slips did he make?’
‘The phone calls. That’s the main thing. When I slipped him the idea, I could see his eyes light up like a pinball machine.’ Richler turned left and wheeled the nondescript Chevy Nova down the freeway entrance ramp. Two hundred yards to their right was the slope and the dead tree where Todd had dry-fired his rifle at the freeway traffic one Saturday morning not long ago.
‘He’s saving to himself, 'This cop is off the wall if he thinks Dussander had a Nazi friend here in town, but if he does think that, it takes me off ground-zero.' So he says yeah, Dussander got one or two calls a week. Very mysterious. 'I can’t talk now, Z-5, call later' — that type of thing. But Dussander’s been getting a special 'quiet phone' rate for the last seven years. Almost no activity at all, and no long distance. He wasn’t getting a call or two a week.’
‘What else?’
‘He immediately jumped to the conclusion that the letter had been stolen and nothing else. He knew that was the only thing missing because he was the one who went back and took it.’
Richler jammed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
‘We think the letter was just a prop. We think that Dussander had the heart attack while he was trying to bury that body… the freshest body. There was dirt on his shoes and his cuffs, and it was fresh, so that’s a pretty fair assumption. That means he called the kid after he had the heart attack, not before. He crawls upstairs and phones the kid. The kid flips out — as much as he ever flips out, anyway -and cooks up the letter story on the spur of the moment It’s not great, but not that bad, either… considering the circumstances. He goes over there and cleans up Dussander’s mess for him. Now the kid is in fucking overdrive. MED-Q’s coming, his father is coming, and he needs that letter for stage-dressing. He goes upstairs and breaks open that box—’
‘You’ve got confirmation on that?’ Weiskopf asked, lighting a cigarette of his own. It was an unfiltered Player, and to Richler it smelted like horseshit No wonder the British Empire fell, he thought, if they started smoking cigarettes like that.
‘Yes, we’ve got confirmation right up the ying-yang,’ Richler said. ‘There are fingerprints on the box which match those in his school records. But his fingerprints are on almost everything in the goddam house!’
‘Still, if you confront him with all of that, you can rattle him,’ Weiskopf said.
‘Oh, listen, hey, you don’t know this kid. When I said he was cool, I meant it. He’d say Dussander asked him to fetch the box once or twice so he could put something in it or take something out of it’
‘His fingerprints are on the shovel.’
‘He’d say he used it to plant a rose-bush in the back yard.’ Richler took out his cigarettes but the pack was empty. Weiskopf offered him a Player. Richler took one puff and began coughing. ‘They taste as bad as they smell,’ he choked.
‘Like those hamburgers we had for lunch yesterday,’ Weiskopf said, smiling. ‘Those Mac-Burgers.’
‘Big Macs,’ Richler said, and laughed. ‘Okay. So cross-cultural pollination doesn’t always work.’ His smile faded. ‘He looks so clean-cut, you know?
‘Yes.’
‘This is no jd from Vasco with hair down to his asshole and chains on his motorcycle boots.’
‘No.’ Weiskopf stared at the traffic all around them and was very glad he wasn’t driving. ‘He’s just a boy. A white boy from a good home. And I find it difficult to believe that—’
