“We’re working with the Israelis on this,” Richler said. “In a very unofficial way. I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention that if you decide to see any press people. They’re real professionals. There’s a man named Weiskopf who’d like to talk to you tomorrow, Todd. If that’s okay by you and your folks.”
“I guess so,” Todd said, but he felt a touch of atavistic dread at the thought of being sniffed over by the same hounds that had chased Dussander for the last half of his life. Dussander had had a healthy respect for them, and Todd knew he would do well to keep that in mind.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bowden? Do you have any objections to Todd seeing Mr. Weiskopf?”
“Not if Todd doesn’t,” Dick Bowden said. “I’d like to be present, though. I’ve read about these Mossad characters—”
“Weiskopf isn’t Mossad. He’s what the Israelis call a special operative. In fact, he teaches Yiddish literature and English grammar. Also, he’s written two novels.” Richler smiled.
Dick raised a hand, dismissing it. “Whatever he is, I’m not going to let him badger Todd. From what I’ve read, these fellows can be a little too professional. Maybe he’s okay. But I want you and this Weiskopf to remember that Todd tried to help that old man. He was flying under false colors, but Todd didn’t know that.”
“That’s okay, Dad,” Todd said with a wan smile.
“I just want you to help us all that you can,” Richler said. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Bowden. I think you’re going to find that Weiskopf is a pleasant, low-pressure kind of guy. I’ve finished my own questions, but I’ll break a little ground by telling you what the Israelis are most interested in. Todd was with Dussander when he had the heart attack that landed him in the hospital—”
“He asked me to come over and read him a letter,” Todd said.
“We know.” Richler leaned forward, elbows on his knees, tie swinging out to form a plumb-line to the floor. “The Israelis want to know about that letter. Dussander was a big fish, but he wasn’t the last one in the lake—or so Sam Weiskopf says, and I believe him. They think Dussander might have known about a lot of other fish. Most of those still alive are probably in South America, but there may be others in a dozen countries ... including the United States. Did you know they collared a man who had been an Unterkommandant at Buchenwald in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel?”
“Really!” Monica said, her eyes widening.
“Really.” Richler nodded. “Two years ago. The point is just that the Israelis think the letter Dussander wanted Todd to read might have been from one of those other fish. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. Either way, they want to know.”
Todd, who had gone back to Dussander’s house and burned the letter, said: “I’d help you—or this Weiskopf—if I could, Lieutenant Richler, but the letter was in German. It was really tough to read. I felt like a fool. Mr. Denker . . . Dussander ... kept getting more excited and asking me to spell the words he couldn’t understand because of my, you know, pronunciation. But I guess he was following all right. I remember once he laughed and said, ‘Yes, yes, that is what you’d do, isn’t it?’ Then he said something in German. This was about two or three minutes before he had the heart attack. Something about
Dummkopf.
That means stupid in German, I think.”
He was looking at Richler uncertainly, inwardly quite pleased with this lie.
Richler was nodding. “Yes, we understand that the letter was in German. The admitting doctor heard the story from you and corroborated it. But the letter
itself,
Todd ... do you remember what happened to it?”
Here it is,
Todd thought.
The
crunch.
“I guess it was still on the table when the ambulance came. When we all left. I couldn’t testify to it in court, but—”
“I think there was a letter on the table,” Dick said. “I picked something up and glanced at it. Airmail stationery, I think, but I didn’t notice it was written in German.”
“Then it should still be there,” Richler said. “That’s what we can’t figure out.”
“It’s not?” Dick said. “I mean, it wasn’t?”
“It wasn’t, and it isn’t.”
“Maybe somebody broke in,” Monica suggested.
“There would have been no need to break in,” Richler said.
“In the confusion of getting him out, the house was never locked. Dussander himself never thought to ask someone to lock up, apparently. His latchkey was still in the pocket of his pants when he died. His house was unlocked from the time the MED-Q attendants wheeled him out until we sealed it this morning at two-thirty A.M.”
“Well, there you are,” Dick said.
“No,” Todd said. “I see what’s bugging Lieutenant Richler.” Oh yes, he saw it very well. You’d have to be blind to miss it. “Why would a burglar steal nothing but a letter? Especially one written in German? It doesn’t listen. Mr. Denker didn’t have much to steal, but a guy who broke in could find something better than that.”
“You got it, all right,” Richler said. “Not bad.”
“Todd used to want to be a detective when he grew up,” Monica said, and ruffled Todd’s hair a bit. Since he had gotten big he seemed to object to that, but right now he didn’t seem to mind. God, she hated to see him looking so pale. “I guess he’s changed his mind to history these days.”
“History is a good field,” Richler said. “You can be an investigative historian. Have you ever read Josephine Tey?”
“No, sir.”
“Doesn’t matter. I just wish my boys had some ambition greater than seeing the Angels win the pennant this year.”
Todd offered a wan smile and said nothing.
Richler turned serious again. “Anyway, I’ll tell you the theory we’re going on. We figure that someone, probably right here in Santo Donato, knew who and what Dussander was.”
“Really?” Dick said.
“Oh yes. Someone who knew the truth. Maybe another fugitive Nazi. I know that sounds like Robert Ludlum 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 Bormann 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! Dussander’s stupid goddam idea! 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. Dussander’s phone had actually rung only half a dozen times 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 out in 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. “Somehpw, some way, to some degree. But is he cool? If you poured hot water into his mouth I think he’d spit out ice-cubes. 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, the courts are still going to look at him as a juvenile—the kid’s only seventeen. 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 saying 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-five, 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 was gone 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 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 smelled 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.