The Music Lovers, page 10
He gave it a beat and said, “I am shtupping her, too.”
13
IT WAS beginning to look like Leon’s little circle of friends had at least one thing in common besides stereo. It also looked like Sheila had a funny way of repaying her sneaky but sweet lover for saving her life.
To avoid future surprises I asked Pavel Fleischer if Hank Diamond—the one member of the club I hadn’t yet met—had also been . . . shtupping Sheila Mozkowski.
“I don’t think so,” Pavel said miserably. “You don’t know how ashamed I feel.”
“It’ll be our little secret,” I told him. “Did Sheila tell you anything more about the guy with the records?”
“She says she has known him from before, in the seventies when he was performer. She says his name is Bob Adams.”
“Did she mention whether he came from Detroit?”
Pavel Fleischer shook his head. “No. He talks with kind of Southern accent, I think. Like Sherwood.”
“What did he look like, this Bob Adams?”
“He is a big guy, fat. Maybe he is forty years old. He has red hair, this guy, and a square face and blue eyes.”
I hated to admit it, but it did sound as if Bob Adams looked like Richard Wagner.
“There was something about this guy I don’t like. You go into so many strangers’ house like I do, you figure out how to know if there is gonna be trouble. This guy, he was pretending to be nice guy. But his eyes . . . they’re not nice. Also he did something bums me out—real bummer. We’re talking about these records he has, and Sheila, she says something . . . I dunno what, but I think it is funny. Only this guy, he doesn’t think it’s funny, so he hits Sheila on the cheek. Not hard, but not like no slap, either. Sheila, she laughs, but I don’t think it is funny. So, I leave.”
“Did you ever see this Bob Adams again?”
“No. I don’t want to see him again. Later Sheila tells me she isn’t gonna see him no more either. She says he’s just a one-night stand. Old times’ sake. I tell her I am upset how he hits her, but she tells me ‘I will handle it.’” Pavel Fleischer ducked his head. “Sheila is pretty good—best—at handling guys.”
“When was all this?”
“I guess maybe three and half, maybe four years. Nineteen eighty-eight.”
“O.K., Pavel. Thanks.”
Sighing as if his heart would break, Pavel got up from the table. “I guess I should go back to the room. Someday I’ll get enough courage to tell Leon. It is a bummer what I do . . . what I do to him. Total bummer.”
“He probably already knows,” I said reassuringly.
“It does not matter. I must tell him.”
******
I took what Leon and Pavel Fleischer had told me down to the CPD on Ezzard Charles. I found Al Foster, my dour friend on homicide, in his cramped little office, smoking up the usual storm. Officially they’d limited smoking at the CPD to certain areas of the building—just like they had everywhere else in the world. Al’s office seemed to be the nexus of the world plan.
“You know I’m up to six packs a day now,” he said with pride.
“Keep going, Al. Try for a carton.”
“I ran that Kentucky plate for you.”
“Yeah? Get anything from the partial?”
I had to wait while he stubbed out a Tareyton and lit a fresh one from the smoldering butt.
“You’re in luck, Harry,” he said. “It’s a stolen plate on a stolen car. Reported stolen yesterday evening from a druggist named Pete Quince in Bromley.”
Bromley was a little town due west of Covington and Newport, about five miles downriver from Cincinnati.
“I don’t suppose this Quince had any idea who stole his Caddie?” I asked.
“Why sure he did, Harry. He took after the thief on foot and got shot in the head.”
I thought Al was kidding. But he wasn’t.
“The guy who stole Quince’s Cadillac also stole a whole shitload of narcotics from Quince’s drugstore, Saturday night about nine o’clock. Armed robbery and aggravated homicide. By the bye the Kentucky SP would very much like to know where you spotted this vehicle.”
“I didn’t spot it,” I said. “A friend of mine was almost run down by it.”
“When was this?”
“Late last night on River Road.”
Al Foster stared at me morosely. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the whole story?”
“Because I’m not.”
Al sighed, breathing tusks of smoke out his hairy nostrils. Smoke seemed to cling to every part of him, like he’d been baptized in sulfur when he was a baby. “Aw, fuck it. What do I care? It’s a Kentucky thing.”
“I need another favor, Al.”
Foster snorted so hard he blew the cigarette out of his mouth onto the desk. “God, you have balls,” he said, snatching the butt up again.
“I want the LEADS sheet of a guy named Bob Adams.”
“You do, do you? Any particular Bob Adams? FBI Quantico’s probably got a couple thousand in the data banks.”
“I can be a little more specific.”
I gave him the description of Adams that Leon had given me and Pavel Fleischer had confirmed. “He may have been a Marine. At least he has a ‘Semper Fi’ tattoo on his arm. He worked as a singer in the seventies and rep’d for a record company sometime in the mid-to-late eighties. Also he’s got a southern accent, maybe Kentucky or Tennessee.”
“That’ll narrow it down,” Al said, scribbling down what I’d told him. “It’d be even better if you had prints.”
“Well, I don’t have prints. All I have is what I told you. This is real important, Al. If you could run it right away . . .”
“I’ll run it, Harry. But if this guy Adams is the guy who killed the druggist and stole the Caddie I expect to hear. And I mean as soon as you do.”
******
If Adams was the guy who’d killed druggist Pete Quince, Sheila Mozkowski was in even more trouble than I’d supposed. In the space of about five hours on Saturday night, Bob Adams had committed armed robbery, grand theft auto, aggravated homicide, assault with intent, and kidnapping. A man that desperate wasn’t likely to waste a lot of time on ransom negotiations. If Sheila Mozkowski or Leon Tubin didn’t fork over the thirty grand, my guess was he’d kill the woman. How Bob had sniffed out the thirty thousand and what, if anything, he had to do with it, I didn’t know. But Leon knew. I was sure of that.
So I drove back through the cold dusk to Jewish Hospital, parked in the garage, and walked down the long hallway that ran from the garage through the main floor of the hospital to the Ridgeway wing. It was dinnertime so there was nobody to bump into when I got off the elevator at the twelfth floor. I went past the nurses’ station to the end of the north wing hallway. To my surprise there was no one standing outside Leon’s door—none of the usual audio crowd. It made better sense to me when I walked into the room.
Leon’s bed was empty. Alas, so was Mr. Goldfarb’s.
I went back up to the nurses’ station and asked one of the candystripers which floor Leon had been transferred to.
“I think you better talk to the head nurse,” the girl said with just enough alarm in her voice to make me nervous.
The head nurse, a barrel-shaped black woman wearing a name tag that read “T. Seeger,” gave me a dark look.
“Leon Tubin left the hospital around an hour ago.”
“He left?” I said with shock. “What do you mean he left?”
Head Nurse T. Seeger put her hands on her hips and stared at me down her nose. “Now what do you think I mean? He checked out of the hospital. We just treat ‘em, mister. We can’t keep ‘em in a bed if they don’t want to stay there.”
“For chrissake.”
“Don’t you raise your voice,” she snapped. “Don’t you think we did everything we could to talk him out of it? That boy has a concussion, a dislocated jaw, a broken nose, cracked ribs, a bruise on his left kidney—and God knows how many contusions and lacerations. But he could walk and he could pay his bill at the bursar’s office. And that’s all it takes to get out of here.”
“Exactly what happened when he left?” I asked.
“What do you mean ‘what happened’? I just told you he walked out.”
“I mean before he walked out. Did he get a phone call? Was there anyone in the room with him?”
“Ask Miss Reich here,” Nurse Seeger said. “She was on duty.”
The little candystriper slipped in front of the head nurse, like a kid coming out from behind her mother’s skirt. “I went down to Mr. Tubin’s room to check his dosage. There was another man in the room with him.”
“Was he a big man, with red hair and a square face and blue eyes?”
The girl shook her head. “No. He was little. And he had a sharp sort of face. Foxy-looking.”
It didn’t sound like anyone I’d met. But it didn’t sound like Bob Adams, either.
“As I was checking the glucose bottle, the phone rang. This other man answered it and handed the receiver to Mr. Tubin. Mr. Tubin listened for a while and turned kinda gray. He hung up the phone and told this other guy to help him out of bed—he was going home.”
“He said he was going home?”
The girl nodded. “The other one helped him get dressed and took him down on the elevator.
“I tried to stop him,” she said, tearing up. “But he just wouldn’t listen.”
If the call had been from whom I thought it was from, I could understand why Leon wouldn’t listen. I turned on my heel and started for the elevators. Behind me I could hear Nurse Seeger soothing her friend.
“Don’t you let that man upset you. You did your job just fine. It’s not your fault that fool in 1222 was crazy. There are always going to be some crazy fools in this world.”
14
I MADE the trip to Leon’s house in less than fifteen minutes, tearing out River Road to Saylor Park. From a block away I could see the lights in Leon’s front windows. Lights all over the house.
I pulled up in the driveway, in front of a beat-up Subaru parked by the garage. Hopping out of the car, I ran up the steps to the front door, which was standing wide open, and through it into the barren living room. A short, fortyish man with a sharp-featured face and a spiky shock of brown hair was sitting on the sofa, reading a stereo magazine. The room around him had been turned upside-down. The speakers were lying on their sides. The TV was on the floor with its back torn off. The bottom plate of the amplifiers had been pried loose with a screwdriver. The preamplifier looked like it was broken in two pieces, and the turntable in three or four.
Even the cushions from the couch had been ransacked. Their covers were torn off and the pillows scattered on the floor, except for the one that the man with the stereo magazine was sitting on.
I glanced quickly at the dining room and saw the same shambles of broken and overturned furnishings.
“Leon?” the man on the couch said, turning a page of the magazine. “You got company.”
I heard a groan in the dining room and saw Leon emerge from the darkness like Oedipus at Colonus.
The man on the couch glanced blithely over at him. “You O.K.? You need some help?” he said without moving a muscle.
Leon gave him a dirty look. “S’m h’lp,” he said.
The little man hobbled into the living room, groaning with each step.
When he got to the living room he gave the guy on the couch a long look.
“You wanna sit down?” the man finally said.
He got up, still holding the magazine, as Leon literally collapsed on the single cushion. “O.K. if I take this to the john with me?” the guy asked. “There’s a great article on Lyritas.”
“Jus’ go.” Leon said, throwing his hand at him weakly.
The man walked out of the room, stepping through the debris as if it weren’t there.
I stared at Leon.
“S’like s’n y’rslf in a m’r.”
“Use a pad, will ya?”
Leon pointed to a pad and pencil sitting on the floor by a mangled stereo stand. I picked it up. Leon had already used it once, presumably with the guy from the couch, because there were a couple of words written on it in capital letters: “SHUT UP!”
I handed the pad to Leon, and he scribbled on it: “It’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.”
“You mean that guy?”
He nodded disgustedly. “Hank Diamond,” he wrote. “Audiophile.”
I looked around the room. “Was the house like this when you got here?”
Leon nodded again. “Fucking neighbors didn’t hear a thing,” he wrote on the pad.
It could’ve been the burglar or Adams. My guess was Adams. Sometime that afternoon he must’ve taken Sheila’s key and broken into the house, searching for the thirty grand in the fridge. Only I’d already taken it to my office. It made me a little sick to think that Sheila might end up paying dearly for what I’d mistakenly done to protect her.
“What happened at the hospital?” I asked Leon.
“Got a call from ‘Bob,’” he wrote. “Said he wanted the cash. Or he’d kill her. But I can’t find the money!”
He looked up at me desperately.
“I’ve got it,” I told him. “I put it in my office safe.”
Leon started to cry. “Th’k G’d,” he said, putting a shaking hand to his forehead.
I gave him a moment to collect himself. Somewhere in the back of the house I heard the john flush. A second later Hank Diamond walked back into the room.
“Hey, you O.K.?” he asked Leon, who was still weeping with a hand to his brow.
“He’ll be fine,” I said.
Hank Diamond gave me a casual once-over, as if he’d just noticed I was standing there. Which was probably the case. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Harry Stoner. I work for Leon.”
“Yeah. What? Hi-fi repair?” Diamond glanced at the gutted stereo system. “He’s gonna need some. Christ, you should see the basement.”
It might have been my imagination—it was certainly unfair—but I thought I heard Leon sob even louder.
“He used to have a great record collection,” Diamond said with relentless bad taste.
“Let’s talk about it some other time.”
Diamond shrugged. “Not talking about it isn’t gonna change things. I lost my stereo once. Lightning hit my house.”
That didn’t surprise me.
“The insurance company called it an ‘act of God.’”
I could only hope it was the first act on an ongoing smoting.
“Guess I’ll go,” Hank Diamond said, dropping the magazine at his feet. “S’long, Leon. Don’t take any wooden records.”
He went out the front door.
“Better move your car,” he called over his shoulder. “Unless you want it to look like Leon’s house.”
I went out and moved the car. When I came back in Leon had fallen into a glassy-eyed torpor, as the enormity of what had befallen him and his settled over him.
“Ga’ n’thn l’ff,” he said in a leaden voice.
And he didn’t. In the space of a day he’d lost almost everything that mattered to him—his stereo, his records, and his faithless lover.
“We still have a chance to get Sheila back,” I said without much confidence.
Swallowing hard Leon picked up the pad again. “Bob said he’d call me—here at the house,” he wrote, “to arrange an exchange for the money.”
“Did he let you talk to Sheila?”
Leon nodded. “She sounded scared,” he wrote.
I could scarcely blame her. Bob Adams was a scary man.
“Where did all that money come from, Leon?” I asked.
He looked up at me and sighed. “She had it when we met,” he wrote. “Said it was for a rainy day.”
“It’s raining, Leon.”
He nodded grimly.
******
I managed to pry a few more pieces of information about the money out of Leon Tubin, among which was the fact that Sheila had shown some of it to him on the first night that they’d made love, which, knowing Sheila, was probably the same day they met. Sheila was living in a dump in Anaheim at the time. She’d stored the cash in the refrigerator there, too, wrapped up in aluminum foil. Like the ones I’d opened, the brick she’d shown Leon was full of one-hundred-dollar bills. Sheila didn’t tell him where she’d gotten all that cash. She just said it was insurance for a rainy day.
Over the years it had become a running joke with them—what they called the “freezer account.” Sometimes Sheila talked about using the bread to make a comeback as a singer. Sometimes she talked about blowing it on a trip to Europe with Leon—making a grand tour of all the great orchestras and festivals. Sometimes, when she was pissed off, she said she was just going to take it and move out. But when it came down to it she never spent a dime of the freezer account.
Leon thought he knew why. “I looked inside one of the packages one afternoon,” he wrote, scribbling laboriously on the dwindling pad of note paper. “The bills were in consecutive order, like they’d never been circulated. I think they might have come from something illegal.”
“No shit, Leon,” I said to him. “You sure she never mentioned this guy Bob Adams to you?”
“Never saw his face before,” Leon wrote.
I knew through Pavel that Sheila had had an affair with Adams some years before. And since she was in the habit of confessing her past—and recent—indiscretions to Leon, I found it odd that the name Bob Adams had never come up.
I gave the little man a hard look. “Are you telling me the truth, Leon? I’m pretty sure Sheila and Adams . . . well, they were more than just friends at one time.”
“You don’t have to be polite,” Leon scribbled, “Sheila has taken many lovers. I don’t care.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she loves me. You’ll see.”
I hoped that I would.
“Maybe he’ll just take the money and go,” he wrote in what appeared to be a slightly more hopeful hand.
“Maybe.”
Only I wasn’t counting on it. Bob Adams was simply too desperate to be trusted. He’d been burned once that afternoon, when Sheila had sent him to the house for the thirty grand. He was going to make very damn sure he got the bread the second time. I didn’t think he cared what happened afterward.
