When Old Men Die (7 page)

"What's biting today?" I asked him.

"Same thing that was
bitin
' yesterday," he answered.
 
"
Nothin
'."
 
He looked me over.
 
"
Speakin
' of
bitin
',
somethin
' bite your face?"

"My cat," I said.

"You got to watch them cats.
 
They bad about that."

"You selling any bait?"

"With the fish not
bitin
'?
 
You old enough to know better than that."

"Maybe things will pick up."

He shrugged.
 
"Business always slow this time of year.
 
I never thought I was gonna get rich
sellin
' fish bait.
 
You want some shrimp?"

"Not today.
 
I'm looking for somebody."

"Who might that be?"

"Outside Harry," I said.
 
"Or Ro-Jo.
 
Either one."

He thought for a second.
 
"Now that you mention him, I ain't seen Harry in quite a spell.
 
What you think he up to?"

"I wish I knew.
 
Dino's worried about him."

Jody knew Dino.
 
Everyone who had lived most of his life on the Island knew Dino, even if he didn't like to get out of the house.

"Harry and Dino, now there's a pair.
 
They pals?"

"That's what Dino tells me."

"Huh.
 
I guess it could happen, but they a funny set of buddies if you ask me.
 
Ro-Jo Dino's pal too?"

"Not that I know of.
 
I want to ask Ro-Jo something about Harry."

"Ro-Jo by here yesterday, but I ain't seen him since."

"What time yesterday?"

Jody looked at an old green and white Dr Pepper clock on the wall over my head.
 
The black numbers were faded, but you could still see them.

"Just about this time.
 
Say he
goin
' up to the Randall's."

Randall's was the big supermarket in the shopping center not far up the street.
 
I didn't think Ro-Jo would be going in the front door.
 
I thanked Jody for the information and started to leave.

"You sure you don't want some bait?
 
Little mullet, maybe?
 
You never can tell when
them
fish gonna start in to
bitin
'."

"Not today.
 
I'll be back tomorrow."

"That what you say now.
 
Don't do my pocketbook no good."

I turned back and put my last ten on the counter.
 
"Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?"

He reached under the counter and brought out a stained notepad and the stub of a pencil that had the paint chewed off.
 
I wrote my number and Dino's on it.
 

"If you see Ro-Jo, tell him I want to talk to him," I said.
 
"Then call me.
 
If you can't get me at home, call Dino.
 
That's his number."
 
I put my finger on it.

He covered the bill with his big hand.
 
"I be sure to do that," he said.

I
went on up to Randall's, hoping that Ro-Jo might be sticking to a kind of schedule.
 
Harry was like that.
 
He went by certain places at the same time every day, and Randall's was close to a cafeteria where Ro-Jo might go looking for a bite to eat if the grocery store didn't work out.

Ro-Jo wasn't at the fragrant dumpster behind Randall's, however, nor was he behind the cafeteria.
 
With the money I'd given him the day before, he could have afforded to go through the line, but that wasn't his style.

It was mine, however, so I went in.
 
Feeling in need of some serious cholesterol and fat, I had a bacon and cheese steak, some macaroni and cheese, and some fried okra.
 
I topped it off with two whole wheat rolls.
 
I didn't get any butter for the rolls.
 
Just call me a health-food freak.

When I'd eaten, I paid with one of the fifties Dino had given me and got change.
 
Then I decided to go back to Dino's.
 
He could easily have found out by now who owned The Island Retreat, even if it was a Sunday.
 
He'd resent my interrupting the playoff game, but that was his tough luck.
 
He should be thankful that I'd decided not to beat him up.

D
ino wasn't watching the game.
 
He was talking on his portable telephone when he came to the door, and the TV set wasn't even on.

"Son of bitch," he said as he opened the door for me.
 
He didn't say it to me.
 
He was talking to whoever was on the phone.
 
"Are they sure it's him?"

He listened for a few seconds.
 
I couldn't make out what the voice on the other end of the line was saying, but I could tell that Dino didn't like it.
 
His knuckles were white, and if the phone hadn't been made of sturdy plastic he might have crushed it.

"God damn," he said.
 
And then he said it again.
 
"God damn."
 
He listened some more.
 
"All right.
 
All right.
 
Thanks for calling.
 
Yeah.
 
Right.
 
I'll keep it quiet."

He looked right at me when he said the last part, and I knew he wasn't going to keep anything quiet.
 
He was going to tell me as soon as he hung up the phone, or turned it off, or whatever it is that you do to portable phones.

This one you turned off, which is what he did after saying "Yeah" and "Right" a few more times.
 
Then he set the phone on the coffee table and looked at me.

"You want some Big Red?"

"Not now.
 
What was that all about?"

Dino sat on the couch.
 
So did I.

"You remember
Braddy
Macklin?" he asked.

Nobody who ever met
Braddy
was likely to forget him.
 
He was about five-ten and as close as you can come to a hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle.
 
He could make a fist that looked like it could punch through a concrete wall, and it probably could.
 
Of course that was more than thirty years ago, when I was just a kid.

"I remember
Braddy
," I said.
 
"What about him."

"Somebody killed him."

"You mean he died?"

Braddy
Macklin would have to be somewhere in his seventies now.
 
He'd been the bodyguard for the uncles in the wide-open days, and the toughest-looking man I'd ever seen.

"I mean somebody killed him.
 
That was a guy I know on the cops.
 
They found his body about an hour ago."

"I didn't even know he was still around.
 
Did you ever see him?"

Dino looked a little sorry, whether for himself or Macklin I didn't know.

"No.
 
I never see anybody much.
 
You know that.
 
I talked to him on the phone once in a while.
 
Not often."

"And somebody killed him."

I still couldn't believe it.
 
Who'd kill a man that age?
 
Leave him alone and he'll be dead soon enough.

"Yeah."
 
Dino looked at the floor and shook his head.
 
He couldn't believe it either.
 
"Somebody killed him.
 
And that's not all."

"What else?"

"They found him in The Island Retreat."

"What the hell was he doing there?"

Dino folded his arms and leaned back on the couch.
 
"That's what the cops would like to know."

D
ino had been busy.
 
While I was talking to Jody and eating a high-fat special, he'd been calling a few people he knew.
 
The interesting thing was that he hadn't been able to find out who owned The Island Retreat.

"Some corporation," he said.
 
"That's all the realtor knows.
 
And he wasn't happy that I called him during the pre-game."

"OK.
 
We can worry about that later.
 
What about
Braddy
Macklin?"

"The cops got one of those anonymous calls this morning.
 
Some guy tells them that there's a dead man in The Island Retreat.
 
They go down there to check it out and find
Braddy
.
 
Jesus, Tru, that old guy used to ride us around on his shoulders when we were kids."

Dino didn't usually get sentimental, and I didn't want to encourage him.

"I remember," I said.
 
"What else did the cops find?"

"Not a damn thing, at least not as far as my guy could tell me.
 
Braddy
was shot a couple of times, but I don't know what with or how long he'd been there."

I'd been shot at recently too, and I wondered if there was a connection between what had happened to me and what had happened to
Braddy
.
 
As I said, I don't believe in coincidence.
 
One old man missing, and another old man was dead.
 
That probably wasn't a coincidence either, and if one of the two had been shot, what did that mean for the other?
 
Finding Harry was beginning to seem more urgent by the moment.

"
Braddy
has a kid," Dino said, interrupting my thoughts.

"A kid?
 
At his age?"

"I don't mean a
kid
kid
.
 
She's nearly as old as we are."

I wondered how old he meant.
 
When I was thirty, I thought anyone else would have to be at least twenty-nine to be nearly as old as I was.
 
Now that I was long past thirty, I figured that people even ten years younger were nearly my age.

"Does she live on the Island?" I asked.

"Yeah.
 
She manages a condo out on the seawall."

I thought that I might want to talk to her later.
 
Right now, finding Harry seemed more important.

"About the Retreat," Dino said.
 
"There's something else you need to know."

"So tell me."

"The realtor told me he's had a lot of calls on it the last couple of weeks.
 
Gambling's a hot topic again, and there's a rumor that Galveston's going to vote it in.
 
So the Retreat would be a natural.
 
It's got a history, and some of the old furnishings are still there.
 
Not the roulette wheel or the slots, maybe, but the dining tables, the kitchen, stuff like that."

Dino was right about the history.
 
The Texas Rangers had dumped all the slots into Galveston Bay, and the roulette wheel was probably there too.
 

"Someone's always trying to get gambling voted back into Galveston," I said.
 
"Just about every year, in fact.
 
It never wins."

"This time it might," Dino said.
 
"We've already got the cruise ship that takes people out past the three-mile limit, and there's that dog track just a few miles up the Interstate in La Marque.
 
The state has a lottery, and those Indians out in El Paso or wherever they are keep pushing for casino gambling on their reservation.
 
And there'll be horse racing in Houston later this year.
 
People around here don't want all the gambling money going over to other places.
 
Much less Louisiana.

Lake Charles already had riverboat gambling, and I'd heard that interests in Houston were looking into something similar.
 
Maybe gambling did have a chance to make a comeback in Galveston after all.

"Did your realtor friend say who was interested in the Retreat?" I asked.

"Heavy hitters, he said.
 
That could mean anything.
 
One group has a couple of big-name baseball players in it.
 
Retired players, he said."