by Robert Crais
“But you and Janet didn’t.”
“I don’t work for Janet.” Ellen Lang went very red. “When you hire me I work for you. That means I’m on your side. I act in your behalf. I respect your confidences. My job doesn’t mean cribbing off what the cops dig up. So if you don’t want the cops then I’ll try to live by that.”
She looked at me, then remembered herself and glanced away. “You’re the first private investigator I’ve ever met.”
“The others aren’t as good looking.”
A little bit of a smile came to one side of her face, then left. Progress. She turned and handed me a small stack of white and green envelopes from the table. “I found these by Mort’s desk.” There were phone bills, some charge receipts from Bullocks and the Broadway and Visa, and some gas receipts from Mobil. All neatly sorted.
“There’s only two phone bills here,” I said.
“That’s all I found.”
“I want everything for the last six months, and the checkbook and the passbooks and anything from your broker if you have one, including ILA accounts and things like that.”
“Well, like I said—” The awkward look was back.
“Mort handled all the money.”
“I’m so bad with figures. I’m sorry.”
“Unh-huh.” I pointed at the sandwich. “Why don’t you fix me one of those, only put some food on mine, and when I come back we can talk.”
I went back through the living room and down the hall to the master. The mattress had been pulled back onto the box spring. The clothes and personal items had been picked up and folded into neat piles on the bed, his and hers, outer garments and underwear, all waiting to go back into the drawers. The drawers were back in the chest and dresser, and the room, like the rest of the house, looked in order. She must have started at 3 A.M.
Two shoe boxes and the Bekins box were on Mort’s desk, filled with envelopes and file folders and actors’ résumés and more of those glossy 8×10’s. On the back of each 8×10 someone had stamped The Morton Lang Agency in red ink. I went through his rolodex, pulled cards for the clients I recognized, and put them in my pocket. In the second shoe box I found registration papers for a Walther .32-caliber automatic pistol purchased in 1980. Well, well. I stood up and looked at the room but didn’t see the gun sticking out of any place conspicuous. Halfway down the Bekins box, under a three-year-old copy of Playboy, I found an unframed diploma from Kansas State University in Morton Keith Lang’s name. It was water-stained. The bills and receipts and bank stuff were near the bottom of the box. Grand total search time: eight minutes. Maybe the box had hidden from Ellen when she came into the room. I have socks that do that.
When I got back to the dining room, a full-grown sandwich sat on a black china plate atop a blue and gray pastel place mat. The sandwich was cut into two triangles, each sporting a toothpick with an electric blue tassel. Four orange slices and four raspberries and a sprig of parsley offset the tassels. A water goblet sat to the right of the plate. To the left was a matching saucer with sweet pickles and pitted olives and Tuscan peppers, and a little gold fork to spear them with. A blue and gray linen napkin was rolled and peaked and sitting above the plate.
Ellen Lang sat at her place, staring out through the glass doors into her backyard. When she heard me she turned. “I put out water because I didn’t know what else you might want. We have Diet Coke or milk or Pabst beer. I could make coffee if you’d like.”
The table was perfect. “No, this is fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
She shifted in the chair. I sat and ate a Tuscan pepper. I prefer chili peppers or serranos, but Tuscans are fun, too.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she said.
“In the box on the desk.” I showed her the stack of paper.
She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I put those things in there this morning. I don’t know why I didn’t see them.”
“Stress. You give a person enough stress and they begin to fog out. People start having little fender benders in parking lots. People forget their keys. People can’t see things right under their noses. It happens to everybody. Even Janet Simon.”
She took a nibble of her sandwich, then rearranged it on the plate. “You don’t like her very much, do you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’s my friend. She’s a very strong lady. She understands.” Sit, Ellen. Speak.
“She’s your anchor,” I said. “She is that because she’s abusive and insulting and she reinforces your lousy self-image, which is what you want. If she’s right about you, then Mort’s right about you. If Mort’s right about you then you deserve to be treated the way he treats you and you shouldn’t rock the boat which is something you do not want to do.” Mr. Sensitive. “Other than that, I like her fine.”
“You made a joke.”
I had said a very hard thing and she wasn’t angry. She should’ve been, but she wasn’t. Maybe enough years of Janet Simon will do that to you. Or maybe she hadn’t heard.
I shrugged. “Being funny, that’s one way to deal with stress. Investigators, cops, paramedics. Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches.”
She looked at me. Blank.
“Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches.”
“Oh.”
“Another little joke.”
We smiled at each other. Just your basic lunchtime conversation.
“Did you mean that, what you said about Janet?” Maybe she had heard. Maybe, deep down, she was even angry. “Yes.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Okay.”
She took another microscopic bite of her sandwich, then pushed it away. Maybe she absorbed nutrients from her surroundings. “You must like being a private investigator,” she said.
“Yes. Very much.” I took the top off one of the sandwich halves, pulled the stems off two of the peppers, put the peppers on the sandwich, sealed it up again.
“Did you go to college for that?”
“University of Southeast Asia. Two-year program.”
“Vietnam?”
“Unh-huh.” I finished the first half of the sandwich, put three peppers on the remaining half, and started on that one.
“That must have been awful,” she said.
“There were some very real disadvantages to being there, yes.” I swallowed, took a sip of water, patted my lips with the napkin. “But adversity has a way of strengthening. If it doesn’t kill you, you learn things. For instance, that’s when I learned I wanted to be Peter Pan.”
She didn’t quite frown. She quizzled. “You’re quizzling.”
“Pardon me?” Confused.
“Me being funny again. I learned to be funny in Vietnam. Funny is a survival mechanism. I started yoga. Pranayamic breathing is a great way to keep your mind right. We’d be in a bunker, six of us, breathing in one nostril, out the other, oming to beat hell as the rockets came in. You see how this gets funny?”
“Of course.”
“Yoga led to tai chi, tai chi led to tae kwan do, which is Korean karate, and wing chun, which is an offshoot of Chinese kung fu. All very centering, stabilizing activities.” I spread my hands. “I am a bastion of calm in a chaotic world.”
Blank eyes.
“I learned that I could survive. I learned what I would do to keep breathing, and what I wouldn’t do, and what was important to me, and what wasn’t. Just like you’re going to learn that you can survive what’s happening to you.”
She pursed her lips, looking away to pick at a bread crumb on her milk glass.
“If I can survive Vietnam, you can survive Encino,” I said. “Try yoga. Be good for you.”
“Yoga.”
Apparently she didn’t consider yoga an appropriate substitute for a husband. “Mrs. Lang, do you know where Mort kept his gun?”
She looked surprised. “Mort didn’t have a gun.”
I showed her the receipt. “Well, this
is years ago,” she said.
“Guns tend to hang around. Keep an eye out for it.”
She nodded. “All right. I’m sorry.”
“You say that a lot. You don’t have to be sorry. You look away a lot, too, and that’s something else you don’t have to do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
She took a sip of her milk. It left a moustache on her upper lip. “You are funny,” she said.
“It’s either that or be smart.” I killed the rest of the sandwich and sorted the paperwork: bank stuff together, credit card billings together, phone stuff by itself. Without Janet Simon around, she was much more relaxed. You could look past the frightened eyes and mottled face and slumped shoulders and get glimpses of her from better days. I said, “I’ll bet you were the third prettiest girl in eleventh grade.”
Happy-lines came to the corners of her eyes. She touched at her hair again. “Second prettiest,” she said.
It was good when she smiled. She probably hadn’t done a lot of that lately. “You meet Mort in college?”
“High school. Clarence Darrow Senior High in Elverton. That’s where we grew up. In Kansas.”
“High school sweethearts.”
She smiled. “Yes. Isn’t that awful?”
“Not at all. You go to college together?”
Her eyes turned a little wistful. “Mort was in theater arts and business. His parents had quite a large paint store there, in Elverton. They wanted him to take it over but Mort wanted to act. No one can understand that in Elverton. You say you want to act and they just look at you.”
I shrugged. “Mort didn’t have it so bad.”
She looked at me.
“He had the second prettiest girl at Clarence Darrow Senior High, didn’t he?”
She looked at me some more until she realized what I was doing, then she grinned, and nodded, and finally gave a short uncertain laugh. She told me I was terrible.
I pushed the paperwork across the table to her. “Be that as it may, I want you to go through and notate all the phone numbers that you can identify. Go through the credit card billings and see if the purchases make sense to you. Same with the bank statements and the check stubs.”
She looked at the stacks of paper. The smile disappeared. No happy-lines around the eyes. “Isn’t that what I’m paying you for?” she said softly.
“We’re going to have to take care of that, too. So far, you’re not paying me anything.”
“Yes, of course.” Awkward and uncomfortable.
I sighed. “Look, I could do this, sure, but it’s faster if you do it. I won’t know any of these phone numbers, but you will, and that will save time. I don’t know what you people bought from the Broadway or on Visa. I see a Visa charge from The Ivy for a hundred dollars a week every week, I don’t know you and Janet make a regular thing of it there every Thursday.”
“There’s nothing like that.”
“There might be something else.”
She was looking at the paper like it was going to jump at her. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “it’s just that I’m not very good at these things.”
“You’ll surprise youself.”
“I’m so bad with figures.”
“Try.”
“I’ll mess it up.” I leaned back in the chair and put my hands on the table. At the Grand Canyon, I’d seen a man with acrophobia force himself toward the guardrail because his daughter wanted to look down. He almost made it, both hands on the rail, leaning forward in a lunge with his feet as far back as possible, before the cold sweats cut his knees out from under him and he collapsed to the pavement. Ellen Lang’s eyes looked like his eyes.
She tried to smile again, but it came out broken this time. “It really will be better if you do it, don’t you see?”
I saw. “Mort really did it to you, didn’t he.”
She stood quickly and scooped up what was left of her sandwich and the Fred Flintstone glass. “You stop that right now. You sound just like Janet.”
“Nope. With me it was just an observation.”
She stood breathing hard for a second and then she went into the kitchen. I waited. When she came back out she said, “All right. Tell me what to do again.”
I told her. “Now, about my fee.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Two thousand, exclusive of expenses.”
“I remember.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. Nobody moved. After twenty or thirty years I said, “Well?”
“I’ll get it to you.”
I took the checkbook out of the stack of bank paper and pushed it across the table to her. “What’s wrong with now?”
A tick started on her right eye. “Do you … take Visa?”
It was very still in the house. I could hear a single-engine light plane climbing out of Van Nuys Airport to the north. Somewhere down the street a dog with a deep, barrel-chested voice barked. There was a little breeze, but the jasmine was soured by the smog. I slid the checkbook back and looked at it. Most of the couples I know have the husband’s name printed out, with the wife’s name printed beneath it, two individuals. Theirs read: Mr. and Mrs. Morton K. Lang. There was a balance of $3426.15. All of the stubs were written in the same masculine hand. I said quietly, “Go get a pen and I’ll show you how.”
She went back into the kitchen. When she didn’t come out for a while I went to see. She was standing with one hand on the counter and one hand atop her head. Her glasses were off and her chest was heaving and there was a puddle of tears on the tile counter by the glasses. Streamers of mucus ran down from her nose. All of that, but you couldn’t hear her. “It’s okay,” I said.
She broke and turned into my chest, sucking great gasping sobs. I held her tight, feeling the wet soak through my shirt. “I’m thirty-nine years old and I can’t do anything. What did I do to myself? What did I do? I’ve got to have him back. Oh, God, I need him.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about Perry.
I held her until the heaving stopped and then I wrapped some ice in a dish towel and wet it and told her to put it on her face.
After a while we went back out to the dining room and I showed her how to fill in the check and how to maintain the balance on the stub. She was fine with the figures once she knew where to put them.
When the check was written she tried to smile but all the life had gone out of her. “I guess I’ll need to do this to pay the bills.”
“Yes.”
“Excuse me.”
She went down the hall toward her bedroom. I sat at the table for a while, then brought the dishes into the kitchen. I washed both glasses and the plate and the saucer, and dried them with paper towels, then I went back out, gathered together the bank records, and went into the living room by the overturned couch. She’d done a fair job of stapling the bottom cloth back on, but she would have a helluva time righting it. I listened, but couldn’t hear her moving around. I turned the couch over and put it where I thought it should go and left.
8
Forty minutes later I was back at my office. It was nicer there. I liked the view. I liked the Pinocchio clock. I liked my director’s chairs. I arranged the rolodex cards I’d taken from Morton Lang’s desk neatly on top of his bank statements. I took out my bankbook and the two thousand dollar check Ellen Lang had written. Her first check. I filled out a deposit slip, endorsed the check, stamped FOR DEPOSIT ONLY over my signature, put it all in the bankbook, put everything back in my desk, closed the drawer, and put my brain in neutral, a relatively easy task.
The outer door opened and Clarence Wu stuck his grape-fruit head and thin shoulders into the little waiting room. “Is now a bad time?”
Pinocchio’s eyes went side to side, side to side.
Clarence came in with his briefcase. Clarence owned Wu’s Quality Engraving on the second floor, above the bank. I had stopped in a week ago to see about the business cards and stationery, tell
ing him I wanted a more businesslike image. “I made up the samples,” he said. “You had some wonderful ideas.”
I didn’t remember having any wonderful ideas, but there you go. He put the briefcase on the desk, took some cards out of his shirt pocket, and laid them out on the case like a blackjack dealer. I looked at Pinocchio. Clarence frowned. “You seem preoccupied,” he said.
“A small loss of faith in the human condition. It’ll pass. Continue.”
He turned the case around. “Voilà.”
There were four cards, two white, one sort of light blue, and one cream. One of the white ones had a human eye rendered in charcoal in the center with The Elvis Cole Detective Agency arced above it and the legend on your case beneath. “Businesslike,” I said. He beamed. The other white card had my name spelled out in bullet holes with a smoking machine gun underneath. Had I thought of that? The sort-of-blue card had a magnifying glass laid over a deerstalker hat in the upper left corner and the agency’s name in script. “Victorian,” I said.
“A certain elegance,” he nodded.
The cream card had my name centered in modern block letters with the word detective beneath it and a .45 Colt Automatic in the upper right quad. I looked at that one the longest. I said, “Get rid of the gun and you’ve got something.”
He looked confused. “No art?”
“No art.”
He looked confused some more and then he beamed. “Inspired.”
“Yeah. Gimme five hundred with my name and the detective and another five hundred that say The Elvis Cole Detective Agency. Put the phone number in the lower right corner and the address in the lower left.”
“You want cards for Mr. Pike?”
“Mr. Pike won’t use cards.”
“Of course.” Of course. He nodded and beamed again, and said, “Next Thursday,” and left.
Maybe I could find Mort by next Thursday. Maybe I could find him this afternoon. There would be advantages. No more trips to Encino. No more Ellen Lang. No more depression. I would be The Happy Detective. I could call Wu and have him change the card. Elvis Cole, The Happy Detective, specializing in Happy Cases. Inspired.
I went down to the deli, bought an Evian water, drank it on the way back up, then went through Mort’s finances. As of two weeks ago Monday, Morton Lang had $4265.18 in a passbook savings account. There was one three-year CD in his name worth $5000 that matured in August. I could find no evidence of any stocks or other income-producing investment in either his name, Ellen’s name, or in the names of the children. Irregular deposits totaling $5200 had been made into savings over the past six months. During the same period, $2200 was transferred to checking every two weeks. Figure $1600 note and taxes, $800 food, $500 cars, another $200 gardener and pool service, another $500 or $600 because you got three kids and you live in Encino. Forty-five hundred a month to live, next to nothing coming in. You only start dealing with a Garrett Rice when you’re scared.